Gerardo Mosquera "Havana Utopia"

Gerardo Mosquera "Havana Utopia"
This lecture is based on Mosquera's own experience as co-founder of the Havana Biennial and participant in the curatorial team of its three first editions (1984, 1986 and 1989). According to the curator, although the Havana Biennial, organized in 1986, was the first global show of contemporary art ever done, that also changed the practice of biennial-making and of world circulation of art, it has not yet received the attention it deserves. The event created a new, truly international “other” space for art from different contemporary practices that were quite segregated at the time. It undertook a critique of modernity, reflecting the new transnational, multicultural, and diasporic identities, breaking away from the Venice and São Paulo paradigms and triggering the proliferation of “a new breed of biennials” around the world. In so doing, it expanded the biennial practice to the whole world, confronting mainstream canons and hierarchies. The presentation will briefly examine the Havana Biennial’s collective creation of a new internationalism in art in the framework of Cold War’s Cuba and its Third World politics, and the contradictions it involved.
This lecture is part of the programme of the online symposium “Rethinking Conceptualism: Avant-Garde, Activism and Politics in Latin American Art (1960s-1980s)”
Q & A session with Gerardo Mosquera via Zoom: 11 March 2021, 18.00 h (GMT +1)
Website: rethinkingconc...
Twitter: @RConceptualism
Instagram: @rconceptualism
Facebook: / rethinkingconceptualism
Credits:
Video: Gerardo Mosquera
Video editing: Katerina Valdivia Bruch
Portrait photo of Gerardo Mosquera: © Wang Guofeng
Graphic: Katerina Valdivia Bruch
CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Rethinking Conceptualism: Avant-Garde, Activism and Politics in Latin American Art (1960s-1980s)
A project by Katerina Valdivia Bruch
In collaboration with Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Instituto Cervantes Berlin
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
Supported by Embassy of Uruguay in Germany, Embassy of Chile in Germany
#rethinkingconceptualism, #LatinAmericanart, #conceptualism, #conceptualart, #HavanaBiennial, #GerardoMosquera