The Cuban political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the mega famous Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny They make up the list of the collective exhibition Nothing is as before which can be seen until this Sunday at the Hessel Museum of Art, in New York.
The exhibition, curated by Cuban curator Abel González Fernández, seeks to create a landscape that re-signifies peripheral environments and reconditions the notion of marginality, reported the Cuban independent media Regular.
Kevin Avila, Liz Cohen, David Cordero, Luis Gispert, and Joiri Minaya are the others called up by Gonzalez Fernandez for this show which is part of a larger project called Rising and Sinking, which presents sixteen graduate exhibitions by master's candidates for the 2023 class of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).
On the reasons for including Bad Bunny in a contemporary art exhibition, González Fernández comment to Regular that “his songs narrate the sexual energy of our time” and “he decisively defends the Spanish language through the refusal to translate [his songs] into English.”
Also, “he disagrees against the supremacy of spoken language to communicate through body language. This body language is shared and learned between black people and the musical communities of the Caribbean and the United States, where hip-hop and reggaeton have evolved as brothers.”
Nothing is as before includes, in addition to the video The blackout – People live here by Bad Bunny, the performance by Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara: Welcome to yumas (2015), with which the Cuban artist and activist disrupted the venues of the 12th Havana Biennial.
Otero Alcántara cross-dressed as a dancer at the Tropicana Cabaret for a month and handed out a card where the artist's personal information appeared along with the title of Miss Havana Biennial.
This action criticized the spectacularization of the Havana event and made a marginalized artist appear as a central figure.
Last Wednesday it emerged that Otero Alcántara He has been ill for several days in the Guanajay maximum security prison, Artemisa, where he is serving a five-year prison sentence.
In June 2022, Luis Manuel, leader of the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and imprisoned since the protests of July 11, 2021, He was found guilty of the crimes of “outrage to the symbols of the country, contempt and public disorder.”
His colleague and friend Maykel Castillo, for his part, imprisoned since May 2021, was convicted of “contempt, attack, public disorder and defamation of institutions and organizations, heroes and martyrs.”
After hearing both sentences, numerous international organizations immediately spoke out against the decision announced by the Cuban courts. The regime did not allow the international press or foreign diplomats to enter the trial and only allowed two family members for each of the detainees to attend.
Declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and included in a Freedom House campaign, the political prisoner's health has deteriorated noticeably in the last year.
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