Cuba. Tatuare La Storia  / Armin Linke: The Appearance of That Which Cannot be Seen

Cuba. Tatuare La Storia (Cuba. Tattooing History)
Curated by Diego Sileo and Giacomo Zaza in collaboration with Jorge Fernández Torres

Press preview and opening: July 4

New performances by Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Carlos Martiel, Grethell Rasúa
July 5–7

Public program with screenings, artists’ talks, guided visits and workshops to discover Cuba through art, architecture, cinema, music and poetry
July 8–19

The PAC in Milan explores foreign cultures through contemporary art, drawing for the 2016 a guideline on Cuban art, both inside and outside the island, incorporating artists from different generations active from the 1970s onwards. 

Tatuare La Storia (Tattooing History) means leaving a mark on a shared identity of Cuba, the metaphor itself for the meeting of cultures flowing into a Creole and tropical horizon, a “mirage” of an utopian but intrinsically contradictory world. Each artist at the PAC exhibition will be a part of the journey towards Cuba, with its magnificence and its difficulties, its sound and furor, its cultural, linguistic and mythical issues, its ideological differences.

Starting from the historical performative nature of contemporary Cuban art, the exhibition will present a large selection of works and installations—some of them conceived for the PAC—of the most representative Cuban artists and the most up-and-coming artists of the new generation, a section dedicated to Lázaro Saavedra (National Prize of Plastic Arts 2014) and a tribute to the two most influential Cuban artists, Ana Mendieta and Félix González-Torres. The exhibition will extend into MUDEC, the Museum of Cultures in Milan, with a site-specific installation by the artist Eduardo Ponjuán (National Prize of Plastic Arts 2013).

Artists: Juan Carlos Alom, Tania Bruguera, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Javier Castro, Celia-Yunior, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Ángel Delgado, Humberto Díaz, Carlos Garaicoa, Luis Gárciga, Luis Gómez Armenteros, Antonio Gómez Margolles, Félix González-Torres, Ricardo Miguel Hernández, Kcho, Tony Labat, Ernesto Leal, Los Carpinteros, Meira Marrero and José Toirac, Carlos Martiel, Ana Mendieta, Reinier Nande, Glexis Novoa, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Eduardo Ponjuán, Wilfredo Prieto, Grethell Rasúa, René Francisco Rodriguez, Lázaro Saavedra, Tonel

The catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, will contain texts by the three curators and the artist and critic Tonel, in addition to a rich iconography.

Armin Linke: The Appearance of That Which Cannot be Seen
Curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and Philipp Ziegler

Opening: October 15

On the occasion of the 12th edition of the Contemporary Day dedicated to Italian art, the PAC presents The Appearance of That Which Cannot be Seen, an exhibition as a process of activating the archive of Armin Linke (*1966 in Milan) through dialogue. Armin Linke has set the initial frame by sharing photographs with thinkers from various fields and inviting them to react. By reading these images through their theories and concepts, each produces a selection illustrating their vision of contemporary society. These selections enter the exhibition organized as a changing topology of dialogues, transforming themselves in relation to PAC’s modernist pavilion architecture.

The Appearance of That Which Cannot be Seen will present more than 120 photographic images with texts and audio, selected among more than 20,000 photographs that compose Armin Linke’s archive. For more than 20 years Armin Linke has been travelling extensively in the attempt of photographing the effects of the comprehensive transformation of infrastructures, and the interlinking of post-industrial society through digital information and communications technologies. His works have recorded the profound economic, environmental, and technological changes that shape our device-based world.

For the five installations of the project presented in 2016 in ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, Arieila Azoulay (*1962 in Tel Aviv), Bruno Latour (*1947 in Beaune), Peter Weibel (*1944 in Odessa), Mark Wigley (*1956 in Palmerston North), and Jan Zalasiewicz (*1954 in Manchester) were invited to engage with Armin Linke’s photographic archive. The exhibition at PAC in Milan will add two additional contributions by members of the scientific world, together with a new installation of all the previous interventions. The project and its installation questions the readability of photographic images and the subjective treatment of global themes, considering the individual nature of research methods and interests.