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The most important artist of the Biennial has a female name and is called CUBA
26June
Articles

The most important artist of the Biennial has a female name and is called CUBA

Jorge Fernández, Director of the Biennale and Wilfredo Lam CenterThis Biennial questions itself the mega show. We started from the premise of thinking about art instead. Not from classical exhibition, but where work can emerge and develop in their natural habitat.

We wanted to see the art in its transdisciplinarity. Artists in dance, theater, cinema will be participating. However, the idea is to go beyond the traditional boundaries of art and also to involve it to science in relation to architecture, with communities, not only neighborhood but scientific, academic ...

Education have to be thought from a creative act, because art affects the ethics bill and that I think is the great challenge that artistic creation can live. The Biennial bets also in turning education also part of the processes of art. If art does not help on that, if it does not intervene, then it makes no sense. We wanted to mobilize most of the general education system, not only art schools. There are projects with students from high school, art school, with elementary schools...

For many people a Biennial can become a bit shocking, because not all the works involve objectivity or have a visuality marked on a traditional classic exhibition area, and this is also a risk involved in this event.

Surveys have been made and results place it among the world's most important. Ours has a very strong social component. A Biennial that is constantly tightening the rope, which looks at itself, which questions to understand then the reality and to intervene it. A Biennial that is trying to adjust to the troubled, complex time, and that assumes with totla reality and organic-factly. I think it's that's what keeps it alive.

It is an event that has continued to defend the spaces that Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa- up to where we can get - the visual arts have earned. We have also managed to have a more significant presence of Asian artists. In this edition the Arab participation is essential compared to the previous ones, and we do not give up to European and American artists. A Biennial that was, even for Cubans, a launching platform.

It is a legitimate space, which looks at art and thinks it. It is a biennial that blends nicely the emerging art, young art that lives in harmony with the artists already in place. In this convergence, in this dialogue, it is also the pedagogical nature having from its second edition and has been shown through workshops and other processes of interaction.

Surely the Biennial is a confrontation space both externally and internally. Building the Biennial carries a work of discussion, debate and analysis of a long time. Furthermore, in an event of this nature many things happen and it is very difficult that everyone can read it in a much more holistic and integrated manner. That always creates confusion and involves risks.

Some projects are very good, others are not. It is something that is overflowing you, because everyone has in his head his own Biennial. 

You can not control everything. In art no one has the last word. It is very difficult to even decide what is art and what is not, because any human work passes through the subjectivity of people and perceptions in construction and therefore can make mistaks. That is a confrontation from the aesthetic standpoint.

To think that there will be no confrontation is a tremendous ingenuity. Art can not escape from political or social processes. Any action you do in Cuba and which is connected by a context, will always generate controversy and discussion, much more in the current situation in the country.

(Taken from Granma, A biennial that thinks and looks at art).

Osmany Betancourt exhibits Restoration to mechanical love as part of   the Organic Romerillo Museum (MOR).

Windows colonial, by Guillermo Ramirez Malberti, Zone project.

Demo, by Eladio de Mora, in the fortress of La Cabana