Tania Bruguera
1968– · Cuban artist working in installation and performance
Tania Bruguera (Havana, 1968) is a Cuban artist who works in installation and performance. Her work centres on questions of power and control, and many of her pieces examine episodes from Cuban history. She matters for the way she links art and social action, a link that has led to several detentions and imprisonments.
She trained in Havana, at the 20 de Octubre elementary school of fine arts and the Instituto Superior de Arte, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also taught between 2003 and 2010. She moved to Chicago in 1997. Her work has been shown at documenta in Kassel, at the Venice, São Paulo, Shanghai and Havana biennials, and at institutions such as Tate Modern and the New Museum in New York.
Between 1986 and 1996 she presented Homage to Ana Mendieta, a series of performances and objects that revived the work of the Cuban artist, officially erased after her exile in the United States. Her first action, in 1986 at the age of eighteen, re-enacted Mendieta’s Blood Trace. In 1998 she staged El Peso de la Culpa, in which, naked and with a lamb’s intestine hanging from her neck, she ate earth mixed with water and salt for forty-five minutes, as a reference to indigenous resistance against the conquistadors. In 2000, at the Havana Biennial, she presented a work in a tunnel at La Cabaña that criticised the regime and was sanctioned by the government.
She later turned towards Useful Art, conceived as projects that transform political and social conditions. In 2011 she began the International Immigrant Movement and founded the Useful Art Association. In 2015 and 2016 she was detained after a performance in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, linked to the Yo También Exijo campaign.
Bruguera left Cuba in 2021 after a deal with the government to free activists imprisoned that year, and she later received the Velázquez Prize for her defence of freedom. Her legacy lies in joining behavior art with social intervention, in works that invite the public to question the hierarchies around them.