Artists can sometimes be almost casual in their use of historical objects, whether they are using items from a fleamarket or artefacts from a museum. While some harness the aura of these objects, Diango Hernández often treats such miscellaneous elements playfully, as he does with the sheets of pale blue quadrille paper that are displayed in blonde wooden frames in the sixth and final room …
‘Warten oder Fliegen – Die ‘Power’ des Zeichenstiftes im Werk des Amateurs. Als die 68er Kuba noch als Insel der Zukunft feiern, erlebt Diango Hernández Castros ‘Vision’ vom neuen Menschen in einer Internatsschule auf dem Land als Alptraum. Auch wenn er seine eigenen Texte wie die seiner Interpreten mit zahlreichen Deutungsmöglichkeiten aus dem kubanischen Alltag versieht, diese wie alle weiteren Erfahrungen in seinem Heimatland …
‘Homesick’ by Diango Hernández. Many artists have transformed museum’s rooms or a commercial galley’s spaces into their temporary “homes”, in these places they’ve lived for days, weeks and sometimes even months. The idea of seeing, assuming, accepting or transforming the “white cube” into a living space it has many social, political and of course cultural implications. Most of these artist’s performances have shown the way …
Since the mid 1990s – in reaction to Cuba’s extreme economic and societal crisis after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc – Diango Hernández has dedicated himself to the aesthetics and content of the crisis’ phenomenon in his home country: “I have followed a line of research since I have started working and this line guides us through many reflections about strategies of validation of …
Flirt mit Aliens by Georg Imdahl. Der Wunsch, Kontakt mit Außerirdischen aufzunehmen, so lernen wir in dieser Ausstellung, verbindet sich in den einschlägigen esoterischen Foren und Blogs häufig mit erotischem Begehren. Ob dieser Befund einer empirischen Erhebung standhielte, müsste eigens ermittelt werden. Auf seine Stichhaltigkeit aber scheint es nicht wirklich anzukommen, hier beim dritten Auftritt der Künstlergruppe Sun State, die diesem New-Age-Phänomen in einer …
Stories about Loss in Darkness by Eva Schmidt. Found furniture, found images and found texts are relics with the power to conjure memories. Functioning as a communicative link between the artist and the viewer, they represent both material and tool for Diango Hernández; he uses them to construct his poetic narratives expressing mourning and loss. Diango Hernández views the museum as a dark and lonely …
“Tropical Gypsy” (The museum of silence) by Diango Hernández. Someone said “silence” and I wished that I could float so as not to hear my footsteps. Standing next to one of the many doors of the museum, the watch-woman wore a white blouse and a blue skirt. She did her job in uniform, with austerity and visible exhaustion. While I, entranced, ran through each …
The exhibition Ordinary Revolutions brings together eight contemporary Latin American artists and showcases their respective conceptual approaches. Using a variety of different media such as sculpture, installation, video, collage and drawing, the artists play with the origins of their source material and its individual poetic qualities, as well as with the sheer complexity of the inherent allusions and references. Their works are based on everyday …
La retaguardia de las estatuas por Javier Montes. Durante la Guerra Fría, las dos fábricas Alemanas de Lego (o sucedáneos Lego) siguieron fabricando sus piececitas a uno y otro lado del Telón de Acero. Pero las diseñaban apropósito para que las democráticas y las federales no encajaran unas en otras. La historia la cuenta Diango Hernández al hilo de su trabajo en el viejo …
Excerpt from ‘Swans without a lake’ by Melanie Bono …The actual theme of the story, though, is a personal experience, an inner conflict: personal fear, and the inability to publicly acknowledge with logical consistency that the revolution has failed, become descriptive of the state of the collective, a pointer to an inability on the part of the whole society to overcome its own stasis, the …
An exhibition of Diango Hernández’s Drawing (Third hand), 2006 will open April 4th at Alexander and Bonin. The work, a set of fifty ink drawings, evolved out of Hernández’s interest in the Polish artist Andrzej Wróblewski (1927 – 1957).
Hernández was drawn to Wróblewski because, in him, he saw a “person confused and affected by a political system: confused because I no longer know how …
Bookshelves can be organized using many different systems and preferences. In a bookshelf a book could have a fat “neighbor” telling maybe a love story and a tall one that talks about how beautiful is the sea. Certainly there is a lot going on inside any bookshelf and I am sure that in any of them live perfectly together differences and contradictions coexist in a …