Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera (born July 18, 1968, Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban performance artist and activist whose work often considers totalitarianism, immigration, and human rights. She founded (2015) the Institute of Artivism/Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) in order to “foster civic literacy and policy change.” Her advocacy of free speech often ran afoul of the Cuban government.

The daughter of a diplomat, Bruguera spent her early childhood in Paris, Lebanon, and Panama. After returning to Havana in 1979, she studied at the Elementary School of Plastic Arts (1980–83), the San Alejandro School of Plastic Arts (1983–87), and the Higher Institute of Art (1987–92). Her early practice involved body-based performance art, including a decade-long (1986–96) series of reenactments of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series. Other works, such as Studio Study (1996) and The Body of Silence (1997), engaged issues of Cuban struggle and self-censorship. In 1994 the government blocked publication of her underground journal Postwar Memory (1993–94), yet she represented Cuba at the 23rd São Paulo Biennial. In 2001 Harald Szeemann, director of the 49th Venice Biennale, included her work in the exhibition “Plateau of Humankind.”

After winning a Guggenheim fellowship (1998) and earning an M.F.A. (2001) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bruguera began staging interactive events. In Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), visitors to Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern were confronted with mounted police who put them through crowd-control exercises. For Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version), presented at the 10th Havana Biennial (2009), she set up a microphone in the Wifredo Lam Centre of Contemporary Art and invited her audience to speak; the Biennial committee formally denounced the performance. Bruguera, who intended to raise awareness and expand cultural inclusion, defined her work as arte útil (“useful art”).

Bruguera subsequently concentrated on global immigration, as seen in The Francis Effect (2014), in which she gathered signatures to urge the Vatican to grant citizenship status to immigrants. On December 30, 2014, the day that she was to set up an open microphone for the performance #YoTambienExijo, she was detained by the police in Havana. She was released after three days, and her passport was confiscated for more than six months. During this time, Bruguera was again briefly detained on May 24, 2015, after hosting a 100-hour open reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in her Havana studio. The performance marked the founding of INSTAR. Once she was able to travel, Bruguera accepted a yearlong appointment as the first artist in residence for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). As a resident, she held an interactive performance piece at Union Square Park called Referendum (2016), wherein participants cast ballots on whether to abolish borders. Bruguera also collaborated with activist groups and government officials to launch CycleNews (2017), a program in which volunteer cyclists traveled to areas of the city with large populations of undocumented immigrants to inform them of the services available through MOIA. Meanwhile, #YoTambienExijo won her a place on the 2016 short list for an Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award.

In 2016 Bruguera also turned to the Internet crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise more than $100,000 in monetary support for INSTAR. She offered to reward her patrons by delivering a message of their choice to the Cuban government during her next interrogation. By early summer 2016 she had launched INSTAR online, had begun to transform her Havana house into a “Think Tank,” a “Do Tank,” and a “Wish Tank,” and had awarded the first INSTAR residency to the dissident Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot. Later that year she released a video announcing that she would run in the 2018 Cuban presidential election and encouraged others to do so as well. The video was a performance and not the start of an actual campaign, but Bruguera hoped that it would call attention to the one-party system of Cuba.

In 2017 the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, organized the retrospective “Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power/Hablándole al Poder.” The next year Bruguera received a commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Her work included a giant portrait of a young Syrian refugee, covered with heat-sensitive paint and visible only when exposed to enough body heat, requiring visitors to work together. In late 2018 Bruguera was once again detained by Cuban police, this time as she went to protest the internationally decried censorship law Decree 349, which required that artists, collectives, and performers in Cuba receive approval from the Ministry of Culture before delivering their work in public or private spaces. In subsequent years Bruguera and other artists were arrested numerous times for protesting the decree. Her clashes with the government culminated in 2021, when she agreed to leave Cuba to assume the position of senior lecturer in media and performance at Harvard University in exchange for the release of 25 political prisoners.