Tania Bruguera

Over the past three decades, Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera (born 1968) has consistently and inventively blurred the line between art and activism. She first gained notoriety for her 1997 solo performance The Burden of Guilt (El peso de la culpa), a response to the mass suicide of a group of Indigenous Cubans who had consumed soil to demonstrate resistance to Spanish occupation. Subsequent works have frequently put her in conflict with the Cuban government: most notoriously, in Tatlin’s Whisper #6, performed in her native Havana in 2009, she set up a stage for audience members to speak uncensored for one minute.
Featuring a die-cut cover, Tania Bruguera: Let Truth Be, Though the World Perish includes her most significant performances and installations, as well as a new work designed for Milan’s Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea.

A controversial figure working in installation and performance, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (born 1968) has consistently blurred the lines between art and activism. Defining herself as an initiator rather than an author, she often invites spectator participation and works in a collaborative mode, working with various organizations, institutions and individuals to challenge political and economic power structures and the control they hold over society. She researches and performs the ways in which art can be applied to everyday life, and how its effects can translate into political action. From offering Cubans one minute of uncensored time in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución (#YoTambienExijo, 2014) to operating a flexible community center in Corona, Queens (Immigrant Movement International, 2011), Bruguera strives to make Arte Útil (Useful Art), an art that imagines and provides tools to bring about social change.

Published in the Fundación Cisneros’ Conversaciones/Conversations series, this volume features an in-depth conversation between the artist and the renowned art historian Claire Bishop. In this interview, Bruguera tells her own story, recounting the development of her early work in 1980s Cuba, motivated by her political activism, and her shift from intimate performances to the orchestration of the large-scale interactive situations and events that characterize her work today.

Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder surveys Bruguera’s artworks for the public sphere created between 1985 and 2017, all of which position art as a resource for social change. This collection of works offers the reader a deep understanding of the artist’s strategies for intervening in power. Richly illustrated and including rarely seen documentation of Bruguera’s actions, this volume features texts by José Luis Falconi, Grant Kester, Suzanne Lacy, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Peggy Phelan.