group of photographs is organized as a whole. Even though
the photographic object is still thought of as the print that
emerges from a darkroom, it has also become a much more
malleable object and a collectible piece.
As art critic Rosalind Krauss points out, a photograph
changes its function and meaning according to the discursive space it occupies.11 Be it casual, intuitive or conceptual,
the contextualization generated by the space that houses
a given image (the museum, a wall in the family house,
the newspaper) attributes to each image a specific genre
(art piece, family photo, war image, etc.). The conditions
of production and presentation of a photograph dictate its
proper use and establish a specific “grammar” of signification. If what we say can never be completely separated from
how we say it, the change of language in new photography-based art necessarily means a change of conversation.
This exhibition features art that significantly manipulates the photographic image at any of its production
stages, altering at least one of the medium’s basic premises:
bi-dimensionality, co-presence of subject and object, the
fact that it is printed on paper or other surface. We find
collages that use fragments of old photographs, objects
composed of piles of photographs, juxtaposed or superimposed photographs, all of which create the illusion of seeing
time unfold in a single surface. Sometimes artists change
the material condition of a photograph by printing images
on material other than paper or by displacing the visual
aspect of photography to other senses. By transcending the
original, constitutive premises of the medium, any contemporary photograph is an invitation to ponder what it means
to create, print, and look at a given image. In all these cases, photography is doing something new while commenting
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on the possibilities of photography to speak otherwise.
Apertura engages with photography in this new self-reflexive moment. In order to interpret a photograph, we
need to understand the context of both its production and
its exhibition. What a photograph says will depend on the
objects that surround it, the objects it depicts, and the ones
it evokes; it will depend on additional objects or signs, be it
duplication, fragmentation, proliferation, displacement, or
the addition of drawings and text. When looking at these
images, we see a window into the difficult conditions of
Cuba as an embargoed island, and as a prisoner of its own
history. We also see that something has been broken on
the surface of things. Representation is no longer whole. The
pieces included suggest a new permeability in the definition
of today’s photography, and an invitation for artists to
explore alternative forms of saying things with and through
optically captured and recorded images.
Today’s Cuba, which combines highly trained artists
with complicated conditions of art production, offers a perfect laboratory for finding new forms of creating art. One
could say that photography-based art emulates the survival
practices of Cuba’s Special Period, when essential objects
had to be recreated through unexpected substitutions and
esoteric combinations. As tools broke down and goods disappeared from markets, Cubans had to find creative ways
to make dubious approximations of everyday items with
materials borrowed from unlikely sources. In Cuba, then,
the experience of the Special Period gives an additional
layer of self-reflection to today’s photography. Like Cuba in
the 1990s, photography itself is undergoing its own “special
period,” one in which art objects are created through unexpected replacements, and the combination of apparently