Cuban performance and installation artist Tania Bruguera works between Havana and Chicago, creating politically charged and challenging pieces that explore the relationships between art, activism, and social change. In a rejection of singular authorship, Bruguera often creates proposals and models for others to use, and often collaborates with other individuals and institutions. With a celebrated career spanning more than 20 years, she has shown work and performed at prominent biennials and fairs around the world, including Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, and Art Basel. Bruguera’s work is also collected globally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

Tania Bruguera has been arrested several times in Havana in recent months as a result of her intention to reenact her performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version) in the public space at Plaza de la Revolución on December 30, 2014. Her idea was to set a simple stage with a PA system to allow any person to speak freely for one minute. The performance was initially presented at the Wifredo Lam Center during the 10th Havana Biennial in 2009, and was a historic event in Cuba–for the first time in half a century a free public forum was allowed for people to speak their minds. Bruguera had managed to use art’s permissive environment to create a space for freedom in a totalitarian context. Art’s “weakness” as a minority practice paradoxically empowered it to attain something that has remained impossible for social activism in Cuba due to harsh repression. It was a limited action, but one with major symbolic impact, as it incited and helped people to overcome their fear and offered a clear demonstration of Cubans’ feelings and opinions. Although this 2009 performance was authorized by the Biennial organizers, the results—people crying for freedom and democracy—seemed to have surpassed these officials’ miscalculations about self-censorship’s strength to curb people’s desire to freely express themselves.