The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s Latin America Programs supported two exhibitions in Vienna, Austria during the official program for Vienna Art Week 2023. From October to December 2023, including the period of the Vienna Art Week, VOC allied with the Cuban artist group Forma Foco and the Austrian gallery Entre, to present two exhibitions of Cuban artivism.
As a part of the 3rd exhibition cycle of On the New Viennese Scenes and Beyond at the Contemporary Art Museum Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Austria (on view 25 October – 3 December 2023), “Alibi” is conceived in the context of widespread national frustration in Cuba, generated by increased repression and violence unleashed by the Cuban government following the anti-government protests of July 11, 2021. As a result, the Justicia 11J platform was founded (one of the invited participants of ALIBI), and has documented nearly 2000 political detentions, nearly 1000 people with prison sentences of up to 30 years, and a sharp increase in emigration for political reasons since July 11, 2021.
ALIBI is an alternative to this historic fate. Its curatorial model consists of inviting Cuban artists, activists, and human rights platforms to collaborate on artistic proposals that imagine the future of Cuba outside the straitjacket that its history has become. Their multimedia responses provide ways of reading Cuba’s future anew through artistic proposals, collaborative gestures, and communication strategies emerging from methodologies that intersect the work of human rights platforms, researchers, and artists of various disciplines.
Participants (artivists and organizations) participating at ALIBI were: Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, Camila Lobón, Raychel Carrión, Ernesto Oroza, Julio Llópiz-Casal, Liliam Dooley, Luis Alberto Mariño Fernández, Justicia 11J, José Raúl Gallego Ramos, Mitch EC, Kevin Avila, Carla Maria Bellido, Ezequiel Suárez, Centro de Estudios Convivencia, Yimit Ramírez, Claudia Patricia Pérez.
“How Long Have You Been Blind” focuses on the current context of Cuba, in particular on the events of July 11, 2021, when the Cuban people staged the largest anti-government protests recorded since the revolutionaries took power in 1959. These mass demonstrations reflected the continued and growing discontent of Cubans, specifically regarding the Cuban Communist Party’s economic mismanagement, intolerance of dissent, and harsh restrictions on civic and political freedoms. The protests were violently suppressed, resulting in 1,878 arrests. As of the opening of the exhibition 1,052 Cubans remain in jail as political prisoners, and since 2021, more than 400,000 have emigrated to other countries.
How long have you been blind features the work of five Cuban artists, whose approaches find affinity with immersive technologies. This connection exists not only for the ability of artificial intelligence and augmented reality to explore and communicate the implications of recent sociopolitical developments in Cuba, but also as a means of calling attention to the potential impact such technologies could have on various aspects of Cuban society in the future.
Participating artists were Yimit Ramírez, Heidi Hassan, Carlos Quintela, Kiko Faxas and Camila Lobón.
These exhibitions in Viena were possible thanks to the work of ENTRE Gallery’s Marilyn Volkman and Forma Foco’s team: Solveig Font, Lester Alvarez Meno, Aminta D’Cárdenas, and Julio Llópiz-Casal.
