2017
Questions for Cuba's Future

DATA OF INTEREST

GUESTS:
Greg Sholette
Olga Kopenkina


Synopsis:

When INSTAR was in its early stages of formation, we held a workshop designed around Cuba's imagined future. The US-based artist, activist, and academic Greg Sholette, an expert in socially engaged art and the author of a number of key texts for understanding artivism in recent decades, proposed a deconstructive exercise applied to the Cuban context and based on the hypotheses he explores in his book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture. In addition, Olga Kopenkina, a Belarussion curator that specializes in link between art and social and political changes in Eastern Europe, presented creative solutions that arose during the historic period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A number of art collectives, founded on the concept of putting culture at the service of delayed, unfulfilled, or assaulted social agendas, shared their visions and creative resources for conducting artivism in Cuba.

The closing exercise was centered around how to position artivism vis-à-vis the power vacuum that could emerge if Cuba were to undergo social transformation. What would happen to the artistic mission of projects that are wholly focused on the current reality if circumstances were to change? What would you want to say to Cuba in 10 years?
We were left with more questions than answers. Given the intense rigor with which artivism addresses its particular context, what would socially engaged art look like? What language would be used to elevate local demands to the sphere of global discourse?

Diverse individual perspectives coalesced into a collective longing for artivism to become even stronger in the coming era. We imagined the perspective gained by a different way of life, where survival will depend on reclaiming or reinventing our creative mandate.

Gulf Labor is a coalition of international artists working to ensure that migrant worker rights are protected during the construction of museums on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi and in any part of the world where elite art institutions, massive capital investments, and precarious working conditions intersect.

Social Practice Queens (SPQ) is a unique program offering an MFA concentration and postgraduate certificate and bringing together the resources of an academic research institution, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) and the longstanding activism community based out of the Queens Museum.


Biografías:

Olga Kopenkina

Kopenkina is an independent curator and art critic based in New York. In 2008, she received the BRIC Rotunda gallery Emerging Curator Program fellowship. Among the many exhibits she has curated are: The Work of Love, The Queer of Labor, along with artist Yevgeniy Fiks, in 2017; Feminism is politics, at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2016; Lenin: Icebreaker Revisited, in 2015; and Sound and Silence: Art During Dictatorship, at EFA Project Space, New York in 2012.

Gregory Sholette

Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, teacher and activist. He is a Professor at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches arts studies and co-directs the Social Practice Queens MFA concentration. Sholette holds a PhD in History and Memory Studies from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2017), and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Theory (1996), the University of California San Diego (1995), and the Cooper Union School of Art (1979). His recent projects include DARKER, an exhibition of ink wash drawings, at Station Independent Projects NYC, and the collaborative initiative Dark Matter Games in Venice, Italy. His publications include: Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto/U. Chicago Press, 2017), which is a follow-up to Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2010). He is an active member of the Gulf Labor coalition, among other projects.