Still of Coco Fusco, "Your Eyes Will be an Empty Word", 2021. MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. © Coco Fusco, VEGAP, Barcelona.
Exhibition
23.05.2025
Coco Fusco. I Learned to Swim on Dry Land
in progress
Entitled, I Learned to Swim on Dry Land – the first sentence of the poetic microfiction “Swimming” (1957) by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera – the exhibition’s focal points are the word, the symbolic use of silence and the inversion of language with its historical and contemporary confrontation between artistic expression and figures of authority. A critical place here is occupied by Cuban poetry and literature.
The lives and imaginaries of dissident figures such as the poets Virgilio Piñera, María Elena Cruz Varela, Heberto Padilla and Néstor Díaz de Villegas, among others, as well as artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the musician Maykel Osorbo – all of whom endured the regime’s repression – interweave an audiovisual, performative and documentary journey that presents post-revolutionary Cuba to us within a complex formulation of ideas about revolution and homeland, among other things.
Cuba is central to the project, as is the United States and its immigration policies, the rise of the right wing and its insistence on a structural monoculture. Extensive documentation, curatorial projects, ephemera and objects from the artist’s performances bear witness to her artistic research, for example, the publications English is Broken Here (1995) and Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), and her celebrated exhibition Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003–04).
According to the artist Coco Fusco, during the years she and Guillermo Gómez-Peña performed The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–93), they encountered two very different responses to their personification of fictional characters from the island of Guatinau. While the mainstream public believed that the Guatianus were actual natives, intellectuals, artists and cultural workers insisted on discussing the piece’s moral implications rather than the work itself. What was meant to be a satirical commentary on concepts such as exoticism and primitivism proved to be a revealing exercise about the role of cultural institutions and the condition of the spectator, as well as the exhibition event or museum as a producer of otherness – either through the re-enactment of infamous human zoos or the formulation of a canonised aesthetic that offered little space at the time to artistic practices from the so-called periphery.
Reversing the framework of institutional representation, returning the gaze to the other, questioning colonial histories and the cultural and scientific processes that have constructed monolithic forms of identity and continue to observe cultural difference with some scepticism: these are concerns that, since the 1980s, have informed both Fusco’s work and her activism and institutional critique, demystifying the art institution’s multiculturalism and its frame of systematic meaning. Her artistic and curatorial trajectory encompasses performance, video art, pedagogy, criticism, art theory and research to interrogate systems of power.
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artist
Coco Fusco
New York, 1960
Coco Fusco is a Cuban-American writer and interdisciplinary artist. A significant part of her work has focused on themes of colonialism, power, race, gender and history. In her work she uses her own body, not only as a space of fusion, but also as its immediate product. Through performance she creates and inhabits multiple identities in order to destabilise those which have historically been imposed on bodies by colonial, racial and gender-based forces. She also engages with legacies of Cuban exile through Catholic rituals and experiences of displacement. Her works have been presented at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, the Whitney Biennial in New York, and the Sydney Biennial. More information at cocofusco.com.
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curated by
Elvira Dyangani Ose
Elvira Dyangani Ose has occupied the role of Director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) since September 2021. Previously, she was Director of The Showroom, London. She sits on the Advisory Council of Tate Modern and is a member of the Thought Council of the Fondazione Prada, where she has curated numerous projects, including: Theaster Gates: True Value; Nástio Mosquito: T.T.T. Template Temples of Tenacity; and Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer. Until the end of November 2018, she was Creative Time’s Senior Curator, co-curating the 11th edition of the Summit entitled On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries: Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World, among other projects.
Dyangani Ose was curator of the eighth Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator of International Art at Tate Modern (2011–14). Previously, she was Curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, and Artistic Director of Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial (2013). Multidisciplinary in nature, her curatorial projects address the narration of history as a collective experience, the way in which public space is intervened, and the recovery of non-Western narratives and epistemologies. They include: A Story Within a Story… (2015); Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2013); Across the Board (2012–14); Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies (2010); Arte Invisible (2009, 2010); and Olvida Quien Soy/Erase Me From Who I Am (2006).
As a specialist in contemporary African art, she has taught seminars and participated in conferences about contemporary African artistic production and culture. She is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University in New York. She holds a Diploma of Advanced Studies in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a degree in History of Art from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Recently, she served as a visiting professor in Catalan Studies, an initiative organised by the Institut Ramón Llull and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at New York University.
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Dyangani Ose was curator of the eighth Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, (GIBCA 2015) and Curator of International Art at Tate Modern (2011–14). Previously, she was Curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, and Artistic Director of Rencontres Picha – Lubumbashi Biennial (2013). Multidisciplinary in nature, her curatorial projects address the narration of history as a collective experience, the way in which public space is intervened, and the recovery of non-Western narratives and epistemologies. They include: A Story Within a Story… (2015); Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2013); Across the Board (2012–14); Carrie Mae Weems: Social Studies (2010); Arte Invisible (2009, 2010); and Olvida Quien Soy/Erase Me From Who I Am (2006).
As a specialist in contemporary African art, she has taught seminars and participated in conferences about contemporary African artistic production and culture. She is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University in New York. She holds a Diploma of Advanced Studies in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and a degree in History of Art from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Recently, she served as a visiting professor in Catalan Studies, an initiative organised by the Institut Ramón Llull and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at New York University.
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gallery of images
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