resistArt starts during Foro Intemperie 2 in Madrid

Foro Intemperie is a cyclical cultural event about art, society and human rights in Cuba. The next edition of Foro Intemperie entitled Art, Politics and Obsession takes place during the ARCOmadrid, the international art fair, and will be dedicated to contemporary Cuban art in an international context.

The theme of the three-day meetings was provoked by last year’s “Art is not democracy” exhibition presented by the Cuban Ministry of Culture during Arco Madrid 2022. This exhibition consisted mainly of “apolitical” Cuban artists who seem not to see the problems of Cuban street and turn a blind eye to the local reality.

Meanwhile, last year was the largest outflow of Cubans from the island in the history of Cuba. This deeply-rooted humanitarian crisis is a result of systematic degeneration of the regime, the collapse of education, health care, culture and economy, and of continuous repressions of Cuban people which intensified after the anti-government demonstrations in July 2021. The government’s response was mass arrests, followed by long prison sentences. Among those imprisoned were independent artists who have been opposing human rights violations and restrictions on freedom in Cuba for a long time. Imprisonment of a person, however, does not mean imprisonment of thoughts. Many Cuban visual artists related to the San Isidro Movement and the 27N – the collectives founded in Cuba to demand freedom and cultural rights, exhibited outside of Cuba across the world, from Buenos Aires and New York to Madrid and Vienna.

 
Foro Intemperie wants to focus on two of such exhibitions: Obsesión, Vienna, Austria (curated by Solveig Font and Marylin Wolkman) and Sin Autorización: Contemporary Cuban Art, NYC, USA (curated by Gwen A. Unger and Abel González Fernández). A common feature of the exhibitions is their commitment to the sociopolitical realities of the island that have changed the Cuban cultural map in recent years. Socially engaged art is, in turn, a special feature of the newly established resistArt gallery, which represents artists of various generations from Latin American countries, primarily from Cuba, and supports the causes for which the represented artists stand.

With thorough presentation of these three initiatives Foro Intemperie 2 intends to discuss independent contemporary Cuban art that has become one of the most effective fields to give visibility to the systematic violation of human rights in Cuba, while the Cuban artists, also the artists that have contributed to these 3 projects, have been the face of civic awareness and the protagonists of a change towards democracy in Cuba.

 
Panelists & moderator

Gwen A. Unger – Ph.D. candidate, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Abel González Fernández – MA Candidate, Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College and independent curator
Marilyn Volkman – artist and curator based in Vienna
Patrycja Satora – co-owner of resistArt gallery, a former diplomat, a PR and fundraising manager in many international NGOs, Warsaw
Solveig Font – activist and independent curator; the director and founder of Avecez alternative art space in Havana.
Lester Alvarez Meno – artist and filmmaker based in Madrid.

Program:
Inauguration of resistArt gallery and an opening of the collective exhibition Las Mieles (curator: Solveig Font)
Screening the documentaries: Laziness in Cuba; Rancor; Familia en movimiento; Souvenir y Medicos de misión
Discussion and presentation of two exhibitions of Cuban contemporary art: Obsesión and Sin Autorización: Contemporary Cuban Art.