October 6, 2014

     Cecilia Crespo

©  OnCuba Magazine

 

Under the title of Witches, but also Warlocks, the Aglutinador space and the Maniac Art Museum these days exhibit a sui generis exhibition that blends art with rites and religious beliefs from different parts of the planet.

 

Celebrating its twenty years, this space for creation and exhibition directed by the artist Sandra Ceballos, brought together nearly fifty people in this exhibition where spirits, amulets, orishas, paranormal events, and energy are the protagonists.

 

Artists, esoterics, astrologers, researchers, healers, ritualists, believers, practitioners, mystics, both Cuban and foreign, invoke magic, sensuality, and spirituality through various techniques, styles, textures, genres, and both conventional and experimental expressive possibilities.

 

The show, made up of 38 works, can be seen until the end of this month in the colonial house of Alfredo Ramos, on Línea106, permanent headquarters of the Museum of Maniac Art in Havana.

 

Sandra Ceballos told OnCuba that the exhibition is not about showing religious or folk art. The artistic intention is to excavate in the enigmatic presence of the "Eggun or dead as the matrix of all clandestine psychophysical phenomena, legitimize and qualify precisely those intelligent energies that do not sin as egocentric and that are possibly more authentic and spontaneous than the material world."

“Defend their spokesmen, historically discriminated against and repressed by 'science'. To investigate the 'vaporous intervention' of spirits in life, that is the objective" she added.

 

Bruges ... puts an extensive catalog for the consideration of disbelievers and faithful, impossible to visualize and enjoy all at once. It has works by renowned intellectuals and artists such as the researcher Natalia Bolívar, who exhibited her voodoo dolls in a glass case called "Five Spirits."

 

You can see an installation with ashes of human corpses, by Iván Perera, from his series Immanents. Digital impressions of Álvaro José Brunet,  Susan Bank, Rodney Batista also join the show together with works by Javier Alejandro Bobadilla Díaz, José Bedia and Juan Francisco Elso Padilla.

 

A video installation by Tania Bruguera is exhibited that records the petition to the Pope to support the immigrant and undocumented community to apply for the 2014 Vatican City citizenship. You can also see an interesting photograph of the Colón Cemetery, in silver on gelatin, by Pedro Abascal from 1983. From Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal, recognized for addressing religious themes in his work, there is a large-format card: "Evil entered him from below." A video-projection of Marta María Pérez Bravo is included, one of the most spiritual pieces, without a doubt. The installation "EPD" by José Ángel Vincench: gold dust on sheets and candles and a painting from the 2010 Manuel Mendive National Prize for Plastic Arts, are other main attractions of the selection.

 

The Canadian duo The Fastwurms (Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse), with their medieval witch costumes, including a conical hat, arrived with their "Love is Law" installation of varying dimensions: a large spider web made of black bras. Also memorable is “Incompetent King” by Hugo Consuegra, ink and pen on cardboard (1959), and Roberto Diago's work, “Motivo de bosque”, a mixed technique on masonite from 1993, of great vitality and expression as much of his work.

 

Espacio Aglutinador will continue to exhibit genuine and transgressive art as an “emergency room” and autonomous plaza for the promotion and development of Visual Arts, as its founder explains:

 

“This exhibition gives continuity to the work of our non-exclusive space to disseminate the witchcraft of the world, from the dawn of humanity to the present day, passing through the traditions, religions, spells, enchantments, and philosophies of various places and historical moments. As has already been demonstrated on other occasions, Aglutinador is always renewing itself to create alternative projects to its alternativeness ”, concluded Sandra.