The exiled writer
Guillermo Cabrera Infante once called Cuba "an island of ambiguities".
Cuba is a country between socialist utopia and economic
isolation, an island that relates to the "American dream" with ambivalent feelings of love and
hate.
"Los Mapas del deseo" by Carlos Garaicoa, the work that the exhibition owes its
title to, takes up many of the recurring motives in contemporary Cuban art and simultaneously
focalizes them: It is about the constitution of remembrance, about creating an imaginary
past.
And it is about escaping, a key notion of Cuban self-experience. Escaping does not
only mean fleeing from the isolation of an insular position and the economic
misery, but also means the burning desire for an aim unclear in time and
location.
The exhibition is not a comprehensive display of a country, but rather shows how
generally applicable themes of current relevance in the specific situation to be clarified
within the context of Cuba, are taken up by artists who work in depth with this
situation.
About half of the artists exhibited have left their country, however, without breaking
their ties with Cuban culture and history altogether.
The views from and on Cuba assembled in the exhibition refer to a number of
overlapping and vascillating meanings between dream, ideology,
eroticism, nostalgia, freedom, regression, and attachment that all crystallize into "desire" as a
common subject.
Amidst the frictions and tensions of these meanings, Cuban art has become rather
ambiguous and increasingly metaphoric. It is the metaphoric that matters for Cuban
artists trying to come to terms with marginal zones of social reality and its evasion of
the limitations dictated by the authorities, without, however, losing their traditional
penchant for chronicling. |
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