CubaPLUS Magazine

Under the title “Tradition is broken, but it is hard” an exhibition will open this Saturday at the National Museum of Fine Arts, where a group of 19 artists, all women, from several Caribbean countries, will offer a look from the feminine subjectivity at the transcultural processes that occur in the region.

This is how the director of that institution, Jorge Antonio Fernández Torres, defined the exhibition, which together with José Manuel Noceda Fernández, had the pleasure of curating the exhibition that includes paintings, sculptures, engravings and installation, among other disciplines.

We have been working on this exhibition for some time, he said in an interview with CubaPLUS, which he considers “a tribute to Caribbean thought, where great theoretical and intellectual changes have taken place, from the studies of Fernández Retamar (a prominent Cuban writer, now deceased), Caliban, inspired by a Shakespeare tragedy, and other intellectuals who we would say are the mythical basis of all the decolonizing thought being generated in the Caribbean and also at international level.”

The exhibition, he continued, is made up of pieces that speak of each of these countries and also addresses the issue of blackness, the relationship between the popular and the cultured. “I think that what is interesting about the Caribbean is how it takes on the most ancestral traditions, but from a contemporary perspective,” he said.

In answering a question about why there are only women in the exhibition, he said that: “they are all women because we also reflect on the feminine. I think that women have been much more silenced, more forgotten. They have been absent in historiography. Women have been quite eclipsed by patriarchal power and I think that women have been doubly colonized, doubly forgotten, which is why we highlight their presence at the biennial."

The exhibition, which features artists from Barbados, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Aruba, Haiti, Jamaica, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe, Trinidad Tobago, French Guiana and Cuba, will also serve to pay tribute to Belkis Ayón, a prominent Cuban engraver and professor who has passed away.

"Tradition is broken, but it costs" will open its doors on Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Universal Art and will be inaugurated shortly after at the Museum of Cuban Art, and is part of the many exhibitions planned during the 15th Havana Biennial, which will run until next February.