Diango Hernández at MART

The exhibition Diango Hernández: Living Rooms, a Survey is on view in the main MART venue at Rovereto until 26th February 2012.

Diango Hernández was born in 1970 at Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, and now lives in Düsseldorf, after a cultural and professional education that took him from his home country and brought him for a few years to the Trentino, amongst other places. This exhibition is the world's first retrospective to be dedicated to his work, and follows in the wake of the great international recognition he has received, including acquisitions by prestigious public collections such as the MoMA of New York, and his participation in the Venice Biennale of 2005, the São Paulo and Sydney Biennales of 2006, the Liverpool one of 2010 and, that same year, at the Triennale Kleinplastik in Fellbach.

"Diango Hernández. Living Rooms, a Survey" includes more than 100 works dating from 1996 to the present day, with drawings, installations, paintings, videos and two site-specific works ("Resistere" and "A house without objects"), made especially for the Mart.

One of the central themes in the artistic approach of Diango Hernández is a reflection on the traumatic and often incomplete transitions of Cuban society: the painful bequest of slavery, the contradictions of decolonisation and of the Castro revolution; the striving for a new "possible future" following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Diango Hernández, <i>Resistere</i>, 2011. View of the installation at Mart, Rovereto, 2011.
Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Rovereto. Photo Emanuele Tonoli — Diango Hernández, *Resistere*, 2011. View of the installation at Mart, Rovereto, 2011. Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Rovereto. Photo Emanuele Tonoli

Another recurrent theme in these works concerns the personal sphere of the artist. Hernández works by "digging" into his past and his baggage of relations, which he combines and links up constantly with broader reflections about society and politics. This mix explains the title chosen for the exhibition: "Living Rooms, a Survey". The "living rooms" to which Hernández refers are the theatre of fragments of the artist's cosmopolitan life, but they are also places in which all Cubans build their daily existence, often literally: recycling pieces of furniture, household appliances and packaging.

Diango Hernández, <i>Tired stop</i>, 2008. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Art Collection UniCredit — Diango Hernández, *Tired stop*, 2008. Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Art Collection UniCredit

Hernández began to shown an interest in the use of these materials in the mid-1990s, when he was still living in Havana. After his studies in Industrial Design, and on his way to establishing himself as an architect, he decided to go in a new direction. "It was when I was working in an architecture studio", explains Hernández in the conversation with Dziewior published in the exhibition catalogue, "that my eyes were opened. Even though it was one of the most important studios in Cuba, the working conditions were terrible. When I began working, my colleagues – all of them highly qualified professionals who had been working in that studio since the early 1960s – were worn out, wrung dry by a system that every day demanded more, and which offered very little in exchange. For me, it was unacceptable and disgusting". Having abandoned his career as designer and architect, Hernández and some friends began "collecting inventions made by people striving to survive, combining recycled and sometimes useless objects, to make practical everyday tools".

One of the central themes in the artistic approach of Diango Hernández is a reflection on the traumatic and often incomplete transitions of Cuban society: the painful bequest of slavery, the contradictions of decolonisation and of the Castro revolution; the striving for a new 'possible future' following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Top image: Diango Hernández, <i>Power Pencil</i>, 2007. View of the installation at Mart, Rovereto, 2011. Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Rovereto. Photo Emanuele Tonoli. Above: Diango Hernández, <i>Il mio parco</i>, 2007. Courtesy Danilo Vignati. Photo Nadia Baldo. — Top image: Diango Hernández, *Power Pencil*, 2007. View of the installation at Mart, Rovereto, 2011. Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Rovereto. Photo Emanuele Tonoli. Above: Diango Hernández, *Il mio parco*, 2007. Courtesy Danilo Vignati. Photo Nadia Baldo.

Thus, in his "magical" installations, we find cardboard boxes that become radios – "Drawing (Box Radio)", 2003 – beaten-up loudspeakers become birdcages – "Drawing (My Birds Don't Want to Come Back)", 2006 – and legs from a table are transformed into flowers - "Tropical garden", 2009.

Hernández explains: "[These objects] are not incomplete merely because some of their parts are missing, but also because silence has become their permanent function. Not only in space to produce sound but to produce silence, which sometimes can be as noisy as a bomb. […] Silencing an object is tantamount to silencing a person".

Diango Hernández, <i>Homesick</i>, 2009.
View of the installation for the Liverpool Biennial, 2010
Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Rovereto - Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Cologne - Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo Liverpool Biennial — Diango Hernández, *Homesick*, 2009. View of the installation for the Liverpool Biennial, 2010 Courtesy Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, Rovereto - Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Cologne - Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo Liverpool Biennial

Once developed, this language is used by the artist also to read the world "beyond the island" and to form a link between it and Cuba. Hence, for his installation "Power Pencil" of 2007, Hernández used 12 lamp-posts made of wood (from the Valle di Primiero, in Trentino) with porcelain insulators, and transformed them into enormous pencils. These poles, produced using a now outdated technology, were recovered by the artist who, as Luigi Fassi writes in the catalogue, "revives them and transforms them from leftovers that are mementos of a now pointless functionality into gigantic pencils with which to write".

With his inventions, Hernández makes maximum use of the artist's ability to create a dialogue between worlds that seem devoid of the instruments needed to come into contact.

Diango Hernández. Living Rooms, a Survey
18 November 2011–26 February 2012
MART, Rovereto

Diango Hernández at MART

The exhibition Diango Hernández: Living Rooms, a Survey is on view in the main MART venue at Rovereto until 26th February 2012.

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