“For Rent: Consuelo Castañeda” at Americas Society
For Rent: Consuelo Castañeda, is the first of three exhibitions devoted to mid-career artists that will be presented annually from 2011 to 2013.
Consuelo Castañeda (Havana, Cuba, 1958) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Miami. She emerged in the Cuban avant-garde of the 1980s, helping catapult its cultural production onto the international stage and shifting the popular understanding of the relationship between art and politics in Cuba and in wider Latin America. As professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, she was a pivotal figure in Cuba until her emigration to Mexico, and then Miami in the 1990s.
In For Rent , the use value of the exhibition space is actualized through a negotiation between the artist, the interlocutor (guest curator), and the institution, suggesting a model of transference and exchange intended to produce new work. As a broad conceptual framework, the Americas Society Visual Arts Director Gabriela Rangel proposes a collaborative intervention in which each artist departs from the idea of the gallery as a formal exhibition space located in a historic landmark building to the perception of the space as a commodity, the value of which changes with the realities of the real estate market.
For this installment of For Rent, Castañeda creates a series of participatory social spaces that assume the form of an open and public lounge. Castañeda postulates the existence of an intellectual, social landscape meaningful to diverse groups of people. She asserts the possibility of an art venue as a transcultural social environment and invites the public to lounge and contemplate the galleries and their history in the shadow of the Cold War.
Castañeda cannibalizes the gallery using three strategies: a multi-screened projection room; an intervention that inverts an iconic, canonical work made for the Americas Society in 1969; and a retrospective component that highlights the artist’s longstanding use of appropriation. In each room, through arrangements of signs, branded symbols, cinema outtakes, and iconic cultural forms, Castañeda reframes the modes by which they circulate and assume meaning in free-market and communist systems.
www.as-coa.org
