Celebrating the 30th anniversary
(…)Havana Biennial: A Living Laboratory stands out as an anthological show documenting the participation of a vast group of artists in the various occasions this event has been held. The fact of bringing to light the funds testifying a “history” had a bearing on the structuration of the exhibition and, in an ambitious expository display, the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, the Center for the Development of Visual Arts and the Cuban Photographic Library, was chosen. (…)
The journey through the exhibition draws the spectator into a sort of anthology, whose main seduction falls on the chronological will of juxtaposing views of the world and meeting again almost forgotten voices.
(…) For more than three decades, the Havana Biennial has fostered the acknowledgement of alternation and has taken on and put into value practices linked to creations and regions resting on the field of what is fluctuating. But it is necessary to question the validity and topicality of the principles established at its beginning and to have the event focus and redirect the path to follow according to the peculiarities of the context, of art and of today’s artists.
On the other hand, the fact that the Biennial legitimizes and makes possible the insertion of artists in a dominant market and in analogous events cannot become the essential motivation for a meeting having place in Havana. Searching, investigating, analyzing “from within,” should be the subjects we have to retake in future times, where the experience acquired adds to the new, always inclusive, practices.
Guessing the future of the Biennial then becomes a difficult, but not impossible, task. We still have to keenly watch what happens and when it happens, what strategies are stated, what path is drawn. Our close evolution depends on it.
