For over 25 years, Tania Bruguera has created socially-engaged performances and installations that examine the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of society's most vulnerable individuals and groups. Her work has been shown in prestigious mega-exhibitions of art including the 2015 Venice Biennale and dOCUMENTA11, as well as at Tate Modern, London, Guggenheim and MoMA, New York, and other internationally renowned museums and institutions around the globe.
TRACTION: Art Talks with Tania Bruguera
October 3, 2017
7 -9 pm
Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 108
This event is FREE and open to the public. Metered parking is available in the Performing Arts lot.
Bruguera's focus on how art interacts with the everyday political life––and on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness–– makes her the ideal artist to launch UCSC's Institute of the Arts and Sciences new speaking series, TRACTION: Art Talks. The series, organized for 2017/18 in collaboration with Jennifer González and A. Laurie Palmer, brings internationally renowned artists to the UC Santa Cruz campus. The series is designed around the conviction that the arts offer profound insight into the most pressing ecological, cultural, political, and social questions of our time. TRACTION exposes students, faculty, and the broader public to the concerns of contemporary art, always with an eye on how those concerns reflect the larger world.
At UC Santa Cruz, Bruguera will discuss her long-term projects as intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. She will give an overview of how her practice aims to expose the social effects of political forces and present global issues of power, migration, censorship and repression through participatory works that turn “viewers” into “citizens.” UCSC History of Art and Visual Culture professor Jennifer González will then join her in conversation.
Tania Bruguera was awarded an Honoris Causa by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, selected one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award, a Herb Alpert Award winner, a Radcliffe and Yale World Fellow, and the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. She established the Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) program at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and has recently opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana - a school, exhibition space and think tank for activist artists and Cubans. Born 1968 in Havana, Cuba, Bruguera lives and works in Havana, New York and Cambridge.
Jennifer González is Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also teaches at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published in Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her second book, Pepón Osorio was published by University of Minnesota Press (2013).