Havana Biennial

"Bring your swimming suit and flip-flops", announces Glenda León's printed invitation to the eleventh edition of the Havana Biennial. Her piece, Sueño de verano (El horizonte es una ilusión), occupies the swimming pool area of the FOCSA building, a monolithic residential complex of majestic proportions close to old Havana. At opposite ends of the pool, León has installed blown-up maps of Havana and Miami: two cities that lie facing one another, divided in reality by fifty years of political conflict, which to this day separates Cuba from the US. But if the swimming pool was to be that patch of sea, all you'd need to do would be to dive in and off you go, just a few strokes and the divide is overcome. This turns swimming into a highly significant act: it becomes a way of subverting the status quo, shattering the isolation, reaching the other side and ultimately breaking the invisible barrier that has turned Cuba into a world apart for so long. Sipping a drink and listening to music by the poolside suggests a cheerful and human way to confront a situation that politicians don't know how to disentangle.

Glenda León's installation is one in a number of interventions that are scattered across the city for this Biennial. That might seem something that would be expected but it isn't. Biennial curator Jorge Fernandez Torres points out in informal conversation how this sense of openness arises from this year's pioneering extension of the exhibit to a number of sites around the city: not just buildings but also streets, piazzas and the seafront. Moreover, the Biennial also features a considerable number of international — and Western — participants, which is a somewhat new phenomenon for an island that until recently resisted contact and influences on an institutional level, always proud of its self-sufficiency.

Established in 1984, the Havana Biennial initially presented itself as a platform for art from then considered non-central geo-political areas, from Cuba itself to the whole of the Caribbean area, Latin America, India. It was a novel and original project, but after the first few editions, as Cuba's isolation accentuated following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the event seemed to stagnate. Today, after a number of decades of extreme closure, Cuba is embarking, albeit slowly and cautiously, on the road to change. The eleventh Havana Biennial reflects this prudent but evident process and seems to mark a real transition.

This year the central core of the exhibition is at the Wifredo Lam Centre and the Gran Teatro de La Habana. The first houses work by internationally renowned contemporary Cuban artists: Carlos Garaicoa who lives between Havana and Madrid, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Neil Leonard, active between Havana and Boston, and Jorge Pardo, who works between Havana, Los Angeles and Long Island.

Meanwhile the Gran Teatro hosts works by artists from a variety of backgrounds. These works have very little to do with one another but in many cases prove to be interesting. There is Mona Marzouk's video-animation, which imagines a future in which man, animal and machine have been cross-bred to create a single entity; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's installation, a biometric portrait in the form of breathing apparatus that activates itself 10,000 times a day, the normal breathing rhythm of an adult. Or Celia & Yunior's Apuntes en el hielo, a video and a pile of copies of a doctorate thesis in sociology on Cuban society, based on extensive and meticulous research and providing sufficient information on which to be able to begin a process of change… if only there was the will to change. Unfortunately, the files remain where they are, still wrapped up.

Right by the Gran Teatro, collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros — who left Cuba —, presents the best of her collection in one of Havana's most central locations. Her arrival represents an exceptional fact and has been greeted with an enthusiasm that transformed the exhibition opening into something of an event.

Among the more prominent presences are a number of artists who were either born or have settled in the US, such as Marina Abramovic and Andres Serrano, as well as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems and other artists included in the exhibition Cinema Remixed & Reloaded, something that would have previously been inconceivable. Artists like Hermann Nitch and Gabriel Orozco held workshops with the local schools' students. Queer South African performer Steven Cohen has taken to the streets a performance in which he walks with legs trapped in painful clamps that are impossible to move in, making his journey an act of martyrdom. The performance is transformed into an implicit plea for help, testing the degree of empathy and sense of solidarity that a society is able to express.

The programme of exhibitions and fringe events consists of around a hundred projects, from exhibitions to special events. The Fortaleza San Carlos de la Cabaña, a huge colonial fortification situated on the front of Old Havana, and the headquarters of the Biennial in previous editions, exhibits works of Cuban artists from recent generations in unusual proportions — over four hundred artists — but with mixed quality. Guillermo Ramirez Malberti's work stands out: based on the practice of creative restoration via salvage and recycling, he set up a real garage in which the common Cuban practice of reconstructing old 1950s cars by using and reusing every possible mechanical part is exemplified: in Cuba everything can be turned into a resource. Along with the idea of need and recycling, what is put forward here is an implicit criticism of the notion of originality, of the univocal, of purity: in the end we are all composite, multiple outcomes of encounters and grafts.

One of the most powerful presentations is that of Los Carpinteros in Paseo del Prado, the city's central street. The Conga Irreversible is a parade based on the rhythms and dance typical of the Latin-American carnival. However, in this parade every element is reversed: clothes that are usually multi-coloured are black, and black feathers crown the heads of dancers; music and words are inverted, as well as the dancers' movements, whose steps go backwards.

Cuba is a place of contradictions — at times seeming to take two steps forward and three backwards —, but these feed an artistic environment of great richness and vitality. This can be seen in the fringe exhibition organised by the Havana Cultura Visual Arts Project at the Museo del Ron. Six young artists have been a chance to work on large-scale pieces and the result is remarkable, such as with Reinier Nande Perez's video installation which, starting with the urban panorama of Havana, expresses the discrepancy between desire and reality, between a dreamt-of existence and life as it is lived.

Today Cuba resides in that space of discrepancy and the Biennial reflects it. Gabi Scardi