David Castillo & Belkis Ayón Estate announce two major acquisitions of the artist's rare multi-panel works by The Museum of Modern Art, NY and National Gallery of Art, DC In collaboration with the artist's estate, David Castillo will present the first gallery solo exhibition of Ayón's work since her death in 1999, which will be on view from January 30 – April 25, 2024. On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery is releasing a monograph on the artist featuring two historical interviews and selected key works, published by [NAME]. "I use collagraphy because it seems to me the most appropriate technique to express what I want to." Belkis Ayón, Resurrection , 1998, collagraph, 108.87 x 85 inches Belkis Ayón Resurrection 1998 Resurrección was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art at Art Basel in Basel / David Castillo (Booth D14). Between 1991 and 1998, Belkis Ayón made a series of large-format multi-panel collographs, chief among them, Resurrección (1998). Containing varied elements of the Abakuá and using Sikán as the central figure, Resurrección, depicts subjects, emergent and upright, foregrounded by a slumped male figure clad in symbolic head painting. Of the four main figures, Sikán punctuates the composition in hue and in gesture, tracing allegories of her myth across a personal autobiography. David Castillo Booth D14 at Art Basel in Basel 2023 Belkis Ayón, Untitled (Woman in Fetal Position), 1996, collagraph, 89 x 67 inches Belkis Ayón Untitled (Woman in fetal position) 1996 Untitled (Woman in Fetal Position) was acquired by National Gallery of Art at Art Basel in Miami Beach / David Castillo (Booth F34) Belkis Ayón's masterful collographs illustrate the sacred mythologies of the Abakuá, an Afro-Cuban belief system and secret society only men can join. Ayón's works depict teachings that were forbidden to her as a woman; Sikán—the only woman represented in the religion's pantheon is put to death for revealing Abakuán secrets. Ayón reimagined this figure's tragic story across her collographs, bringing them both—one human, one myth—together to navigate male-dominated worlds. David Castillo Booth F34 at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2022

Entrevistas realizadas a Belkis Ayón por reconocidos periodistas cubanos. INTERVIEWS Talk about the myths of art. Interview with Belkis Ayón Jaime Sarusky February 4, 1999 To tell the truth, it was not easy to interview Belkis Ayón, despite appearances, that is, his youth, the recognition that his artistic work has had, his personality, that one would bet very accessible, frank and open as his laugh. But do not confuse such attributes with the vehemence, I would say even the passion, of the creator Belkis Ayón, the one who with steely lucidity knows the paths of yesterday and today of her work. And I'm sure tomorrow too. But his humility and pride, traits that coexist in many authentic artists, prevent him from sanctioning such a prognosis. Although in his heart every great artist knows that it is, the challenge to time is raised and time, in turn, challenges it. Time, for better or for worse, can do everything, except with the great art that resists it, transcends it and walks by its side with an ironic smile ... READ MRE In irregular confidence David Mateo March 4, 1997 ... “It seems that your work aspires to become universal, I tell him, as he hands me a group of matrices on a small table in his apartment in Alamar. The first one represents a fish woman, beginning in the spiritual world of one between two Jicoteas women; but the poetic atmosphere that the relationship between each one of them acquires is so moving that the allegory of the Abakuá legend and its particularly liturgical iconography almost seems to diminish; I had already noticed something similar with the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in one of the winning works at the Maastrich International Biennial ... READ MORE

In irregular confidence David Mateo March 4, 1997 © LA GACETA DE CUBA Magazine, No 2, March / April 1997, year 35, p. 50-51.v … Not a single word of anticipation or impatience. She knows that she is the main reason for this conversation and yet she waits patiently for Segura to finish explaining her sculpture project to me. I have the impression that I have seen her many times in that same deferential attitude, lavishing everything as if everything were superior to her. I do not even know if it is by adhesion or remembrance that I have come to think that his serenity has nothing to do with a marriage courtesy, but that even condescension continues to be his second virtue after colographies. “It seems that your work aspires to become universal, I tell him, as he hands me a group of matrices on a small table in his apartment in Alamar. The first one represents a fish woman, beginning in the spiritual world of one between two Jicoteas women; but the poetic atmosphere that the relationship between each one of them acquires is so moving that the allegory of the Abakuá legend and its particularly liturgical iconography almost seems to diminish; I had already noticed something similar with the inclusion of the Holy Spirit in one of the winning works at the Maastrich International Biennial. To some extent I have always been distant from the Abakuá mythology because my position is rather that of an observer. Distance is precisely that perspective in which I place myself to establish analogies and incorporate any universal experience into the particular logic of myth. I could give you the example of the work Repentida, which was one of the winners in the recent Engraving Meeting, in it a woman appears tearing her skin as a symbol of the ambivalence between what we want to be and what we really are. It seems to me that the Abakuá theme is going to be the starting point for a long time, the pretext for comparisons with life. The universe that its characters and incidental narratives enclose is enough by itself to prefigure any reason for human existence, an equivalence that I have begun to glimpse much more now with the relationship studies that I am carrying out between the mythical Abakuá and Christian religiosity. , for the purpose of creating something of a kind of personal holiness. -But won't you deny me that this process of interlinking between the specific circumstances of the myth and the social cosmogony is produced through a merely female speculation? Do you remember when I told you that you insert a feminine ideal where there never was? I have never thought that my work is feminist. I've never had that built-in calling. The first person who tried to draw attention to this aspect was the critic Eugenio Valdés, and it may even be that there is some reason that my work induces a certain femininity, because it reflects my own existential uncertainty; but I have not conceptualized it that way. The legend of the Sikán is a theme that I have been working on in my engravings since San Alejandro and what has always caught my attention is the condition of victim of the female character, but from a rather generic position, weighing the connotations and the analogies that could be derived from such a situation. And why then your insistence on self-representation? It is true that I am the model of my figurations. They shift with me from one state to another continuously, and even lose weight along with me. They are characters that I submit because I like the idea of deciding their destinies. They are the only alternative of revenge, or correction, lightening the term a little, with which I can count in reality; however I live a less mythical life, I exist from a much more objective perspective, much more objective. The imposition of destinations should consequently alter the meaning of the Abakuá fiction that you allude to. Aren't you afraid of offending the legend? What do the believers you have come in contact with think of that? The Abakuá who have valued my work are mostly intellectuals, and in one way or another they have identified with the project. So far I have not found any detractors. The very mystery of the legend, how hidden some of its meanings have been in the historical development is what has given me precisely the opportunity to make certain speculations, but my position has never been to recriminate the brotherhood, but for the contrary to respecting it and promulgating it in its broadest cultural sense. In this part of the conversation we have already reviewed about six or seven matrices, meticulously delineated with synthetic material, sandpaper, carborundum, gesso and all kinds of rare products in the colographic tradition. It occurs to me to ask Belkis what could happen if all those singular montages that are already ready to give the effects that she has been anticipating, had been drawn or painted on a canvas, and that is when her frankness turns into stupor: I have always been a very bad draftsman. Perhaps because they never demanded an Academy in the Elementary School studies, in the end I decided on engraving. Without realizing it I was creating a kind of trauma with drawing and painting and so I began to look for a type of image that was credible but did not emphasize anatomical delicacies. Then I discovered that with this synthesis of details I protected the mystery of the images more, and that I had to continue emphasizing poses, gestures, and gaze, trying to avoid certain definitions. I may one day get over the trauma and start painting, but I haven't thought about doing it yet. What in your opinion are the immediate antecedents of all this form of representation of yours? I really liked Russian Byzantine icons. I spent a good deal of time looking at them in art books, until one day I discovered that they were perfectly comparable to all Abakuá imagery. I remember that it was a time when I was researching Afro-Cuban cults and specifically the Anafouranas when something curious happened to me: I was in a class in San Alejandro trying to make a kind of dancing devil and Pablo Borges, who was my teacher at that time, told me with the spirit of being impressed, that what I was doing could bring me serious implications, and it was from that moment that I became interested in this type of representation; although in those days my approach to the matter was purely esoteric. In the libraries they denied me the information and enough I had to ask for a letter of authorization in the School. As far as the Legend of the Sikán is concerned, I consider that the reading I did of the book "El monte" by Lidia Cabrera was transcendental, although my awareness of the episode was total when I studied "Los Ñañigos" by Enrique Sosa. I have been about to comment to Belkis about two categories of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye: myth and commitment, which, although they were not issued specifically for the field of Plastic Arts, through them an approximate allegory of his work could also be attempted artistic. But I have only been on the verge of doing it, because in the end I have reserved it for myself, procuring a few more reasons for the literal intervals of this parliament. Something that may even run the risk of forced matching and that goes something like this: "The engravings of Belkis Ayón could be interpreted from the maxim of the critic Northrop Frye, in which he assures that art is" a laboratory where new myths of commitment were prepared, released. " Fabular selection occurs in her case by way of visual and epic identification, mediated almost entirely by a deeply feminine aesthetic rationality - which apparently does not mean the same as feminist, although it is an approach to a deeply macho myth. - We would say that your work assumes a story in which an unequivocal value judgment is represented, from the point of view of the sexual nature of the person who stars and transmits it, although that judgment provides or alludes to cosmogony phenomena such as good and evil, betrayal and sacrifice and the confrontation between victims and perpetrators, and it is precisely within those limits of chaos that she incurs, restoring patterns of behavior and imposing alternative roles. If it were allegories of Frye's notions, his "new myth of commitment" would lie in the fact of opposing a sense of critical analysis to the hermetic interpretation of the mythological event and also in the additional purpose of extending those same collation experiences towards other manifestations of the interhuman bond. Short tense ending and clearly blessed, where the speculator is relieved of his guilt complex: Belkis, it is one thing that I believe in the conformity of all our irregular conversations or our considerations about the plastic arts, and another that I go around commenting on vindications in Cuban engraving, relying on the work of 6 or 7 artists, among which I intend to include you by the way, without even having consulted you before. That is why I take the opportunity now: Am I or am I not right? I believe that important technical concepts and principles are currently being revitalized in Cuban engraving. In my particular case, I would tell you that I am very interested in the level of discursive and aesthetic credibility that matrices can achieve in their final printing, and therefore I try to generate value effects, including color, by experimenting with novel materials. In other young engravers, the tradition has also been altered from many points of view, fundamentally with the experimentation of new supports, with the flexibility of the criteria on seriality with the dynamization, and sometimes even challenge or parody, of technical methods. habitual and in the very consolidation of the ethics of the trade ... and if all this can be called renewal, then I do not think it is bad that someone like you continues to comment on it. PREVIOUS article back to texts

NKAME: A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE CUBAN PRINTMAKER BELKIS AYÓN SELECTED AMONG THE BEST OF THE ART OF 2017 WORLDWIDE BY ARTnews MAGAZINE Jan 4, 2018 Yadira Leyva Ayón © www.artnews.com On December 27, 2017, the article by Andrew Russeth, «2017: THE YEAR IN REVIEW, was published on the ARTnews website. The Year in, and Beyond, New York Galleries — Plus a Top 10 from Around the World. In the article, among other very important contemporary art exhibitions of the year, Nkame… was selected in the number 4 position among the best exhibitions in the world of the year 2017. Andrew Russeth refers: “Once you take a look at the large-scale pieces that Belkis Ayón made by assembling printed panels, you never forget. They are typically black, white, and every shade of gray (though she briefly and incredibly dipped into the color), and they feature, with supernaturally sinuous confident lines, figures with faces that only have piercing eyes, piercing eyes, performing non-ritualistic rituals. identifiable, hugging each other, and, yes, looking at us, inspired by the male and Afro-Cuban secret society known as Abakuá. The world lost the Cuban artist in 1999, at the age of 32, and this retrospective made it clear that if she were still alive, she would be one of the main figures operating today. " Nkame: A Retrospective of the Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón, previously exhibited at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and then at the Museo del Barrio in New York, has been selected as the best of art for two years, as it was also chosen as the best of art in Los Angeles in 2016. Link to the article HERE PREVIOUS NEWS NEXT NEWS

THE AYÓN ESPACE The Ayón Space, the original idea of Dr. Katia Ayón, Belkis Ayón Estate, was a project presented to Cuban cultural institutions in 2004, on the fifth anniversary of the artist's physical disappearance. It was conceived as a permanent space for the exhibition and conservation of Belkis's graphic work and as a place for promotion and support for young printmakers, one of the missions assumed by Belkis Ayón from her position as an exceptional pedagogue. Numerous artists and intellectuals, especially Antonio Martorell and Humberto Figueroa, supported the initiative, which is still waiting for its materialization, and argued, from different perspectives, the need to found it. Goals: • Permanently display the artist's work. • Promote the work of young artists whose main line of work is printmaking. • Offer summer workshops to young national and foreign artists. • Establish the BELKIS AYÓN National Contest of Collography that allows the participation of young and established artists, of national and international character, in collaboration with other art institutions. • Establish links with the community near the place to integrate it into the public activities of the space. • That they can access the valuable and vast bibliography, property of the artist Belkis Ayón: students, ethnographers, sociologists, anthropologists, artists, historians, and teachers.

MAIN COLLECTIONS House of the Americas, Havana, Cuba. José Lezama Lima House Museum, Havana, Cuba. Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, Havana, Cuba. Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich, Switzerland. Dr.hc Wolfgang Schreiner, Bad Steben, Germany. Museum of Art / Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States. Galerie Kho Kho René Corail, Fort de France, Martinique, France. luag. Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States. Ludwig Museum in the Russian Museum, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany. Sofía Imbert Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas, Venezuela. National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba. National Museum of Engraving, Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA, Los Angeles, California, United States. The Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, United States. The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, New York, United States. The Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, California, United States. Coda Museum Apeldoorn, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. Antonio Pérez Foundation, Cuenca, Spain. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, United States. Alex Rosenberg Fine Art, New York, United States. Brownstone Foundation, Paris, France. The Selden Rodman Collection, Art Galleries Ramapo College of New Jersey, United States. University of Central Florida Library, Orlando, Florida, United States. Nelson Fine Art Center, Tempe, Arizona, United States. Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, The Netherlands. The von Christierson Collection, London, England Metropiltan Pavilion, New York, United States. The Farber Collection, New York, United States.

NKAME: A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE CUBAN PRINTMAKER BELKIS AYÓN (1967-1999) Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, United States June 2 - September 3, 2018 After the successful presentations in different cities of the United States, the exhibition Nkame. A Retrospective of the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967-1999), arrives at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas. The exhibition was inaugurated on the night of June 2 in an atmosphere full of friends, excellent music, and lovers of good art. The masterful curatorship of Cristina Vives, stood out on this occasion thanks to a curatorial idea that was brought to life, thanks to the efforts of the Museum staff and its Director James Harritas: many of the large-format works gained three-dimensionality when placed on individual walls, specially built for each piece, resulting in a very positive visual impact, as the pieces obtain an unprecedented monumentality. In addition, this exhibition will feature a book/catalog that will cover the exhibition and the life and work of Belkis Ayón, entitled Behind the veil of a myth . Produced by the Station Museum and the Belkis Ayón Estate, with texts by Cristina Vives and design by Laura Llópiz. The exhibition will be open to the public until September 3, 2018. Photographs: Ernesto León and Yadira Leyva Ayón

ROLLING THEY MEET Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center (SUPEC), Shanghai, China March 3 - April 8, 2014 Under the title Rolling they meet, the CNAP collection exhibited at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center (SUPEC) a selection of its main acquisitions and thus an entire inventory of the most recent Cuban plastic production. It is a set that includes around one hundred artists from the most diverse generations, aesthetics and ways of doing, gathered in an exhibition that seeks to function as a kaleidoscope of the island's symbolic production. The show ran from March to April 2014, following a roaming tour of two other cities in China. Participating artists: Pedro Abascal, Eduardo Abela Torrás, Eduardo Abela Villarreal, Gustavo Acosta, Lidzie Alvisa, Douglas Arguelles, Belkis Ayón, Abel Barreto, Abel Barroso, Agustin Bejarano, Adigio Benitez, Osmany Betancourt, Jacqueline Brito, Servando Cabrera, Luis E. Camejo, Ivan Capote, Yoan Capote, Agustin Cárdenas, Sandra Ceballos, Rafael Consuegra, Raúl Cordero, Raúl Corrales, Arturo Cuenca, Duvier del Dago, Roberto Diago, Alberto Díaz (Korda), José A. Díaz Peláez, Humberto Díaz, Nelson Domínguez , Antonia Eiriz, Roberto Fabelo, Ernesto Fernández, Moisés Finalé, Adonis Flores, Flora Fong, Ever Fonseca, José Manuel Fors, José Franco, Gilberto Frómeta, José Emilio Fuentes, José Fúster, Eduardo Rubén, Osneldo García, Ernesto García Peña, Rocío García, Julio Girona, Luis Gómez, José Gómez Fresquet, José R. González, Javier Guerra, William Hernández, Maykel Herrera, Aisar Jalil, Fayad Jamís, Ruperto Jay Matamoros, Joel Jover, Tomás Lara, Alicia Leal, Evelio Lecourt, Glenda León , TO lberto Lescay, Kcho, Liudmila and Nelson, Rita Longa, Kadir López, Manuel López Oliva, Jorge López Pardo, Raúl Martínez, Rigoberto Mena, Janler Méndez, Manuel Mendive, Michel Mirabal, Ibrahim Miranda, Arturo Montoto, Elsa Mora, Juan Moreira and others.

PRESENTATION OF THE BOOK NKAME. BELKIS AYÓN July 20, 2009 © Belkis Ayón Estate The National Museum of Fine Arts, the National Council of Plastic Arts, José A. Figueroa, and the Belkis Ayón Estate presented at the MNBA Theater. ARTE CUBANO Building, the books: NKAME, Belkis Ayón and José A. Figueroa. A Cuban Self-Portrait, with the participation of Orlando Hernández. NKAME.Belkis Ayón: this book documents in a meticulous way, the life and work of the Cuban artist Belkis Ayón PROJECT DIRECTOR: Dr. Katia Ayón EDITORIAL CONCEPT: Cristina Vives AUTHORS: José Veigas, Cristina Vives, David Mateo, Lazara Menéndez DESIGN: Laura Llópiz 296 PAGES | 400 IMAGES | BILINGUAL SPANISH / ENGLISH EDITION TURNER EDITORES MADRID WITH THE SPONSORSHIP OF: Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich, Switzerland | The Von Christierson Collection, London, England | Afrikan Museum, Berg en Dal, The Netherlands | Cisneros-Fontanalls Foundation, Miami, USA | Alex and Carole Rosenberg, New York, USA | Brownsote Foundation, Paris, France | Caguayo Foundation, Stgo de Cuba, Cuba Belkis Ayón (1967-1999) left after her death a set of essential works for contemporary engraving. The religion and the Abakuá Secret Society (original from African Calabar, and settled in Cuba since the 19th century) served the artist as a "source" and a "reference" to construct a universal discourse against marginality, frustration, fear, censorship, impotence and in favor of the search for freedom. This society, created by men and for men, stigmatizes and segregates women and, in turn, maintains strict discipline and maintains unassailable ethics and mystery. Belkis penetrated the space of the rite as far as she was allowed, and studied all the sources of information at her reach. As a result, she created a breathtaking iconography and interpreted the religious myth from her position as an artist, woman, black, and Latina in the late 20th century. Nkame, synonymous with praise and salutation in the Abakuá language, pays tribute to a creator who left a message of life with her death. José A. Figueroa. A Cuban Self-Portrait: this book narrates more than four decades of the life of a country through the photographic work of José A. Figueroa. RESEARCH AND EDITING: Cristina Vives ESSAYS BY: Cristina Vives, Dannys Montes de Oca DESIGN: Pepe Menéndez 384 PAGES | 384 IMAGES | BILINGUAL SPANISH / ENGLISH EDITION TURNER EDITORES MADRID WITH THE SPONSORSHIP OF: The Busson Foundation Trust José A, Figueroa (Havana, 1946), began his professional life as a photographer in September 1964, when he began working at the Korda Studios in Havana. Due to his age, social extraction, and training, he is part of a generation of "transition" that was at the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, too young to be its manager, but adult enough as a conscious and analytical witness. His life and work, place him between "the inside" and "the outside" of that story. Also has allowed him to document, evaluate and symbolize many facets, both of the public and private life of the nation - two sides of the same coin - over many years; most importantly, it's a work made in Cuba or from a Cuban perspective. These characteristics and circumstances are, indeed, rare among their contemporaries or predecessors, seen individually. A Cuban self-portrait is approximately a portion of that story, through the work of one of the essential names in the history of Cuban photography. Promotional price of sale to the public in the presentation: 250 MN. Courtesy of the Belkis Ayón Estate; José A. Figueroa and the sponsors. PREVIOUS NEWS BACK TO NEWS

Confessions Belkis Ayon February 11, 1991 Some time ago I studied some of the components of our culture, on the African side, the carabalíes and of them the Abakuá Secret Society, made up only of men, a mutual aid and relief society, self-financed by its members. It resurfaces in the 30s of the 19th century in Cuba under other conditions and objectives very different from those of its African ancestors. There are people who feel and have the need to believe in something, which is inherent to human existence and one of those many examples is the following ... that even after so many years initiation ceremonies are held, promotion of obones or creation of new powers; crying or nlloro (funeral ceremony for the death of a member of society); that of refreshing the sacred pieces of the liturgy; as well as the assemblies of squares or the general assemblies; that are still carried out mainly in Havana and Matanzas, exclusively in Cuba. "To be a man you do not have to be an Abakuá but, to be an Abakuá you have to be a man", society does not come to seek prestige but to give it prestige, the best of itself. "There were women in Calabar who played like men in their power (...) and when the ceremonies began, in the mountains, in a cave on the banks of a lagoon, the men stole their secret ..." "Ekue hates women females. The secret is absolutely for MEN ... "(1) By addressing this unknown and hermetic theme for many, not being popular as another component of the Cuban cultural heritage for dealing with certain aspects that have not yet been clarified, I intend above all to make my vision known from its interwoven overflowing sacred memories religious imagination, presenting them in a synthetic way the aesthetic, plastic and poetic aspect that I have discovered in Abakuá (...) "transferring a complex message that despite its conceptual dimension is never direct but allusive ..." (2), going back many times to its origins in Africa. The antecedents of this secret society must be looked for well past in time because they arose in very primitive economic-social formations where man faced the unknown countless times, always seeking a satisfactory answer to the natural and social phenomena that surrounded him. that in my engravings you will be able to observe an infinity of points that coincide with the cultural fact itself, verifiable both in the field of ideas and in visual references. The antecedents of the ñañigos were back in Africa the Secret Societies Ngbe and Ekpe whose names in ekoi and efik respectively mean leopard man. These associations, due to their cults and their great economic and ideological power, were spreading the leopard as a totemic animal whose ... "fraternity is established on a foot of perfect equality between a human group on one side and a group of things, generally animals and plants ..." from the other, as Frazer would deduce in Man, God, and Immortality, totemism, together with the other primitive religious forms (magic, fetishism, and animism) generally achieve sympathetic magic by law of similarity as a result, which they will permeate the life of primitive man, his thoughts and actions. These societies can be found in the area that was included in the so-called Oil Rivers, from the piers of the vast Niger Delta and the Cross River in present-day South Nigeria and part of Cameroon, in front of the Biafra Bay. When I begin to investigate this interesting and mysterious brotherhood, unique in Cuba in its sacred memories -by the way very tangled-I can select characters that in my view are the most important to convey what I want and will be presented in all my works as : the leopard man, designated and identified with him by the different positions and hierarchies of society, to Sikán, a woman who discovers the secret and is sacrificed so that it passes to men and does not disappear. Sikán dies in vain, the secret fades more and more; This consisted of a voice, UYO UYO ANFONO sacred voice produced by a fish discovered by her when she returned from the river, the fish was the reincarnation of the old king called Obón Tanzé, King of Efigueremo who at the same moment was the reincarnation of Abasí, GOD SUPREME. Many were the efforts and attempts, for the transmission of the sacred voice because each time it faded more. The last transmission was on the hide of a goat; There yes! There yes! There was ... "that peculiar, frighteningly adorable sound ..." (3), the voice that vibrates on the sacred EKUE drum. There are innumerable variations of popular imagery when recounting how the events that gave rise to this type of secret society happened and from them I show you my variations intertwining their signs with mine; I use colography turned into a medium with which I feel very identified since it adjusts to my way of doing and that for some years I have been working, offering very peculiar visual information with effects and results that in a certain way harmonize with the subject. In addition to the possibilities that it presents in its multiple nature, which as it is generally defined, is the printing of a collage with a wide variety of materials which are glued on a cardboard support. Referring to the use of color there was a stage that I worked with a great variety of them and at that moment I was very satisfied, but over time I began to feel a certain nostalgia for black, I recognized that I was strongly united making me return to it. According to the materials that I use, he gives me a whole range of whites, grays and blacks, conceiving him as a great ally of the type of figuration I work with, with his composition ... all so hermetic, secret and mysterious in addition to the strength that he transmits to us. I think that these engravings could be a spiritual testimony if you will, not lived in my own flesh, but imagined, where I placed in the foreground an equivalent of the human figure, on which my ideas ultimately and consequently turn, which are memories of the memory materialized as a kind of crush that when the light is turned off and on, new memories appear accompanied by a successful classmate, intuition. I consider that there is a very close relationship between the vision that I offer you and that of the Abakuá Secret Society clearly transmitted in the work of Lydia Cabrera: … "By the knowledge and power of the signs, it makes the past present, recreates the hill, the river, the palm tree, in the sacred places of Awána Bekúra Mendó." Belkis Ayon / 91 NOTES: (1) CABRERA, Lidia. The Abakuá Secret Society narrated by old followers. Havana, Editions CR, 1958 (2) MOSQUERA, Gerardo. Essay on America. Juan Francisco Elso. March 1986 (3) CABRERA, Lidia. The Abakuá Secret Society narrated by old followers. Havana, Editions CR, 1958 PREVIOUS ARTICLE BACK TO TEXTS

COLLECTIVE EXHIBITIONS Renderings. New Narratives and Reinterpretations Mechanical Hall at Delaware University, Philadelphia, United States September 3 - 30, 2014 Read more Havana Factory, Old Havana, Havana, Cuba. May 23 - August 23, 2014 Glances Read more Without Masks. Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art. Museum of Anthropology (MOA), University of British Columbia, Johannesburg Gallery of Art, Vancouver, Canada, Johannesburg, South Africa May 2 - November 2, 2014 Read more Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center (SUPEC), Shanghai, China March 3 - April 8, 2014 Rolling they meet. The Art Collection from the National Council of Plastic Arts Read more In the heat of the thought. Works from the Daros Latinoamérica Collection Santander Group City Art Room, Madrid, Spain February 3 - April 30, 2010 Read more previous Next

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