Public - Volume 26, Issue 52, 2015

Introduction to PUBLIC 52: Havana

Article on Cuba in the immediate wake of 17 December 2014, when Cuban President Raul Castro and US President Barak Obama each delivered a speech about undoing the nearly 55-year blockade against Cuba.

Canadian curator Keith Wallace on Havana-based artists presented in his Vancouver-based exhibition at the Belkin Gallery.

Canadian scholar Karen Dubinsky on Cuba-Canada pasts and present from her forthcoming book about Havana.

Article on the projections of the US Left on the Havana of the 1960s.

French curator Catherine Sicot on her France-Canada-Cuba project, La primavera del amor (‘The Springtime of Love’), an international experimental platform for research and artistic production in Cuba (Havana and suburbs), in development since the spring of 2014.

Curatorial notes from the twelfth edition of the Havana Biennial (2015).

Dossier of art projects from the twelfth edition of the Havana Biennial (2015).

Artists: Raúl Morilla, 2boys.tv, Tirzo Martha and David Bade, Shilpa Gupta, Héctor Zamora, Francisca Benítez, Víctor Ekpuk, Gilberto Esparza, Nikolaus Gansterer, Dr. Lakra, Didier Faustino, Stéphane Gilot, Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, Humberto Diaz, Peter de Cupere.

Dossier of art projects from the exhibition Entre, Dentro, Fuera/Between, Inside, Outside at the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre in Havana/ Twelfth edition of the Havana Biennial.

Artists: Pedro Lasch, Susana Delahante Matienzo, Elizabeth Stevenson, Levi Orta, Stephanie Syjuco, Omar Estrada, Adonis Ferro, Guillermo Ramírez Malberti, Agnes Chávez.

Dossier of art projects from Mountains with a Broken Edge, a project that the authors curated with Wilfredo Prieto, in which artists from Japan to Serbia revitalize an abandoned bicycle factory in one of Havana’s new cultural hubs.

Artists: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Michael François, Ryan Gander, Pierre Huyghe, Gabriel Kuri, Tatiana Mesa, Helen Mirra, Navid Nuur, Roman Ondák, Shimabuku, Roman Signer, Ariel Schlesigner.

Dossier of art projects from the twelfth edition of the Havana Biennial.

Artists: Daniel Buren, César Cornejo, La Curtiduría, Sandra Monterroso, Guisela Munita, Juvenal Ravelo, Adrián Villar Rojas, Colectivo Pico Estudio, Renán Rodríguez, Rafael Villares.

A series of bookmarks by artists who created book works to repurpose the space of a bookstore in Old Havana and reorient the reader-text-image relationship.

A panorama of key events (Salon de Mayo in 1967, the Havana Cultural Congress in 1968, the Exhibition of The Third World in 1968), artworks, and architectures (Pabellón Cuba, Coppelia, ISA, suburban housing, the Expo 67 pavilion) expressive of the cosmopolitanism of the 1959–1969 period – a form of decolonized cosmopolitanism, within which the newly self-described ‘Third World’ claimed Havana as its own.

Review of Play, Precarity and Survival, curated by Sigrid Dahle, organized by the Manitoba Craft Council, exhibited at aceart inc., Winnipeg, 30 July–22 August 2015.

Review of Akram Zaatari, All is Well, curated by Vicki Moufawad Paul, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, UK, 23 November 2013 – 30 March 2014.

Review of Bridget Moser, Tender Offer: Part 1, 8–11 Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 8–11 October, 2014.