The scene of the action is not yet a scene of action, and, unless particular circumstances arise – which they won’t – never will be. A short section of the street between the now-closed cinema and the fifth streetlight from the left. The excellent lighting allows for a fairly detailed description. From the fifth streetlight there approaches the phantom of a woman draped in an …
And ‘Immortality’, Mildews - In the museum of the moon (Mina Loy, Lunar Baedeker, 1923)
On the Moon, in a dale between two mountains, lay all those things that men lost or forgot on Earth.
It has been like this forever, or at least since the expulsion from Paradise.
Along with the things, this dale keeps some particular beakers that contain the reason (the capacity …
inadvertently - Dear D.,
I am marking the start of a period of writing based on the theme of drawing, which is, as we both know, something which unites us and forms us and something which will remain of us, at the end. The skeleton.
Here, things enter, gradually, at the axes. These last months have been very tiring. However, this period is ending. We …
Maybe not everyone is aware that a full colour print is actually the output of four colors combination: The cyan, the magenta, the yellow and the black. It is only through this magic combination that we can perceive what we understand as “the color”.
On a different day, in a very different place, on a street that doesn’t look like any of these ones around …
6 September – 25 October, 2008, Barbara Thumm, Berlin
One wall of Diango Hernandez’s new show out-of-place artefacts (OOPArt), is lined by a row of bright collages, ‘Collagen’, 2008, that immediately attract the attention of the male. Here photographs of chintzy 18th century porcelain figures are spliced with cut-out shapes from soft-core magazines. Prancing horses now have a model’s tanned buttocks. Black-stockinged thighs adorn a …
Marginal Zones of Revolutionary Everyday Life by Ursula Frohne. Diango Hernández’s works illuminate the art-life of the revolutionary spirit of a movement that was political and artistic in equal measure. His subtle Moses-en-scène not only conjure up the economy of scarcity in Cuba – many observers harbor exoticizing ideas about the Caribbean version of socialism- but also point to a particular pathology that is …
BMF is a non-profit arts organisation committed to generating fresh discourse about contemporary culture and current affairs. Based in Budapest (Hungary), it seeks inspiration from the city’s rich history and diverse cultural heritage and provides opportunities for exchange between local and international art practitioners and the broader community through curatorial and educational programmes, artists’ residencies and special projects. The Artist-in-Residence Programme offers up to four …
QUANTUM TUNNELING (the ghost we love) by Diango Hernández. Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa… There has been some reports that testify the present of certain people that eventually can walk through walls, just like ghosts do. A hanging round ball lamp is crossing through 4 different spaces and at the same time is theoretically lighting these four spaces. The four spaces which can …
‘Larger than life stranger than fiction’. Die Umkehrung von Größenverhältnissen, die Miniaturisierung und das kleine Format sind in der bildenden Kunst und Literatur seit jeher Mittel der Verfremdung, um menschliche Werte und das sich wandelnde gesellschaftliche Selbstverständnis zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Bereits in den Wunderkammern der Renaissance trifft man auf Fantasiewesen, Memento Mori-Darstellungen, Miniaturkunst wie auch wissenschaftliche Apparaturen und Naturalien, in denen das Wissen …
After studying Industrial Design in Havana in the early 1990s, Diango Hernández became one of the founders of Ordo Amoris Cabinet, a Cuban artists’ and designers’ collective. This group’s particular focus was the ‘provisional aesthetic’ of making do and getting by adopted by ordinary people during Cuba’s ‘Special Period’, the years acute economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. A decade later, …
As Diango Hernández was studying industrial design in Havana the 1990s, Cuba was learning to adjust to life without the support of the Soviet Union. During this time, Hernández observed the way that global politics impinged upon the daily, domestic lives of Cubans and how scarce resources led people to create their own furniture and domestic artefacts. Initially as an exercise in design research, he …
MOM DEMOCRACY IS A LIE. In the 1990s Diango Hernández started an extended series of drawings which processed the political and economical crisis of Cuba after the collapse of the socialist systems in Eastern Europe. ’We lost the last support of the Sowiet Union, which meant confronting a big crisis. We knew about Perestroika and everyone was concerned: What was the political mistake? But the …