12th Habana Biennial

22.05 -22.06/2015

Amid the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the Havana Biennial, we present the curatorial proposal for itsTWELFTH EDITION to be held between 22 May and 22 June 2015.

A journey through the history of different Havana Biennials allows perceiving how each of them leaves open questions and ways of doing things, taken up in previous editions. This time the curatorial team intends resize atomized strategies of work in previous meetings to explore different paths to the mega exhibition, though these result occasional exercises. This turn is part of what has been one of the most precious resources of the Havana meeting: feel the city and its people, equivalent to engage their communities and professional population, their micro-policies and micro-spaces of socialization. According to this area of debate on contemporary art, which focuses on the movement of  autonomous object contexts and experiences, the Biennale aims to involve the architecture, the design, the phenomena of communication, science and the ways that the habitat is constructed, in order to promote the social inclusion of the proposals, which has historically been part of the aesthetic practices of called South.

The art has transcended the epistemological limitations inherent to other disciplines, it’s symbolic status allows certain licenses when nested knowledge. So, rather than naming practices, we want to accompany processes of transdisciplinary creation and intermediation involving both collaborations of investigative and pedagogical nature. Today is being a still sterile exercise to establish preconceived notions of what we mean by art. The collective perception turns into the challenges and uncertainties generated by the experience; where new cultural horizons open and create other ways of sociability and networking. The projects carried out in Havana will affect its inhabitants either because they participate in their design and implementation or because the works are presented as a living social laboratory. We hope that the various ranges of the urban fabric: universities, research centers and everything that makes possible the integration and can be used as site and as work material.

By referring to this projection we are interested in promoting the intersections between different art forms such as dance, theater, music, cinema and literature, from the semantic richness that brings the hybridity in what we understand as visuality. The essential idea is that these crosses are not just a backdrop but acquire a leading presence. So that our interest in extending an invitation to the confluence of artists and specialists from other disciplines.

The Twelfth Biennial of Havana will not have a central core exhibition. It aspires to settle in those interstices of the city to facilitate work on aforementioned budgets. These ideas extend dissimilar perspectives on the role and functions of curating in the current scenarios, on the relevance or otherwise of a subject presiding dynamics of the work itself and the environment in which it occurs or the intervention that generates every creative process depending on location and the situation for which they were designed. It is important to deepen at the Biennale of the present for then understand what might be the challenges of the future.

Curatorial team
Twelfth Biennial of Havana