The Individual and Her Memory: The Bienal de La Habana 1997

ers simply want to talk to you about their lives: they may have never travelled off the island, so a lew hours of conversation with a visitor is the closest they get to travelling. Especially on the first day, it's very easy to doubt the importance of your work there: the average Cuban cares for contemporary art no more than the average citizen of, say, Columbus, Ohio, but if in Columbus, art people and non-art people seem pretty much alike (it might seem a difference of hobbies), in Cuba your obvious fortune as any kind of tourist is embarassing. Art seems doubly beside the point. So what is all the fuss with the Cuban biennial about? For almost 15 years the Bienal de La Habana has been a nearly lone voice in the international contemporary art world; its mere existence has been an insult to the U.S.'s claim of universality; it has helped launched the careers of quite a few artists from Latin America, Asia/Pacific, and Africa, and for many others it has provided an exhibition site and meeting place with people from all over the globe who probably wouldn't travel to such faraway places as Indonesia or Benin to see what they're doing there. That said, every artist's or critic's or curator 's participation is always a labor of love: with the 39-year old embargo and nearly ten years without the Soviet bloc's support, Cuba's international art exhibition is the most notoriously low-budget and disorganized event around. Much like Cuba itself, it's a miracle that it's happening at all. This year, curator Llilian Llanes Godoy selected as an overall theme "El individuo y su memoria". "The individual and his/her memory" is an oddly appropriate choice for Cuba, considering the double edge it rides between defiance in the name of difference as a nation, and its internal, considerable problems regarding freedom of speech and information. 177 artists from 44 nations responded with a wide range of works dispersed among a number Havana's most historic buildings. Unfortunately, seemingly half these artists resorted to literal interpretations of the curator's theme, peppering the walls of 500year old fortresses and crumbling Spanish colonial mansions with sepia toned photographs of their own families. This could be said to be the fault of both the artists and the very idea of a themed biennial: as much as this topic could (and did) open up a number of interesting discussions around memory and history, without the necessary budget and time to carefully select all works it becomes for most a kind of request that limits imagination. However, considering the topic's ties to the problem of identity, as well as the other fact that not a single artist from Havana made the cross-over to Venice, and only one (William Kentridge) showed at Documenta, we might consider that the "international" art world is currently suffering through a backlash against otherness that makes the subject ever more important. The other half of artists who produced solid works for the biennial could have contributed a lot to Europe's two big events in June. It seems to me that an artist's main job is to ask'intelligent questions . As the market finds ways to absorb and consume affirmations of difference that perhaps entered the field as questions, artists must continually reframe or reword their questions, they must always be more sneaky and self-critical. Kentridge, whose work is beguilingly simple in appearance, hit the nail on the head with his exhibition at the Centro Wifredo Lam in old Havana, pinpointing how in national and cultural crises, the individual's memories and stories are in fact inseperably bound to the larger histories, politics, and theories . UBU and the Truth Commission takes as its subject the current settling of grievances in South Africa. Hand-drawn cartoons of a chubby white man (perhaps the media, or power itself) are combined with other whimsical and violent drawings and real news or film footage of various clashes between antiApartheid protesters and the state in Johannesburg and elsewhere. Penny Siopis continued this inquiry with an installation...