DATA OF INTEREST
GUEST:
SANDRA CEBALLLOS
HOST:
TANIA BRUGUERA
Synopsis:
A delightful conversation between two old friends. Sandra Ceballos and Tania Bruguera talk about Espacio Aglutinador, their experiences with cultural decision-makers, censorship, independent art and freedom.
Bio:
Sandra Amelia Ceballos Obaya
(Guantánamo Cuba, 1961)
Sandra Amelia Ceballos Obaya resides in Havana. In 1982, she took a class with the Mexican artist Martha Palau in her Taller de Arte-Textil at Casa de las Américas in Cuba and in 1983 she graduated from the Academia de Artes Plásticas San Alejandro, Havana. As a visual artist she has worked with performance, photography, painting, illustration, installations, video, texts for artists and journalistic articles, and she has curated and co-curated over one hundred exhibits, both in Cuba and internationally. In 1985 she founded, together with a group of Cuban artists, the 1er. Taller Experimental de Serigrafía Artística René Portocarrero at the Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales de La Habana, where she worked as a illustrator and silk-screener, and coordinator during ten years. In 1994 she created, together with the artist Ezequiel Suárez, the independent art space Espacio Aglutinador in her own home. They have held over 200 different events in the visual arts, music, book readings, conferences, workshops, etc.
In 2001 she curated, together with the artist and curator Luís Camnitzer, the exhibit From the Sierra Maestra to Havana, with drawings by the prestigious Cuban artist Santiago Armada (Chago), for New York´s Drawing Center. That same year she curated the exhibition that Espacio Aglutinador presented for the FAIR at the Royal College of London. In 2008, Espacio Aglutinador, which she still directs, was selected for the originality of its curatorial proposals by a group of prestigious artists, specialists and international critics as part of the hundred best galleries in the world and was one of the top three galleries in Latin America in the survey carried out in New York by the magazine Flash Art. In May 2012, she created the first private itinerant museum of Cuba, the MAM: Museo de Arte Maníaco, with the intention of supporting and promoting the work of curators and art whose existential content unveils the most intimate parts of the human psyche free from scholastic constraints.
