TANIA BRUGUERA EXHIBITION IN CHILE MODIFIED FOLLOWING POLITICAL BACKLASH
A solo show by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera that was set to open September 8 at the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum (MSSA) in Santiago, Chile, was first delayed and then altered after several people, among them the grandson of the deposed Chilean president for whom the hosting institution is named, decried the artist’s stance against the Communist government in her home country. Bruguera has been an unceasing critic of the Cuban states efforts to censor artists and activists.
Allende, a democratically elected president, was assassinated in 1973 during the coup d’etat of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The museum is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the slain socialist leader’s death this year. MSSA director Claudia Zaldivar told Artnews that the Salvador Allende Foundation, one of the entities that supports the museum, had approved Bruguera’s exhibition. However, just prior to the opening of her show, titled “Magnitud 11.9,” Allende’s grandson Pablo Sepúlveda Allende wrote to the museum demanding the show be canceled. He posted a screed on his X (formerly Twitter) account, in which he castigated Bruguera as “an artist who only stands out because her staging is politically contrary to the Cuban Revolution, that same Revolution that both Allende and millions and millions of people in Cuba and around the world admire, defend and love.”
Voices from other quarters rose against the artist as well, including those of the journal of the Communist Party of Chile; Daniel Jadue, mayor of a commune in Santiago de Chile; and activist Víctor Hugo Roble, who variously called Bruguera out as an “agent” of North America and decried her support of democracy in Cuba, accusing her of “mobiliz[ing] money and multinational support” in order to do so.
“This attempt at canceling the show comes from a small group that considers Bruguera a dissident of the current Cuban government, transferring a local Cuban problem to Chile,” Zaldivar said. Exhibition organizers decided to modify the exhibition, as part of which Bruguera had originally intended to identify with an X dwellings near the MSSA that had served as torture and detention centers under Pinochet. That plan was scrapped, with the artist instead assimilating the criticism into the exhibition, which opened a full month late, on October 8. Bruguera in a press release acknowledged that the show would “delve deeper into the challenges of democracy.”
“I decided to make transparent the entire process that the exhibition itself went through, the political tensions, censorship, and pressure,” she told Artnews. “This is what I call arte para un tiempo político determinado (art for a given political time).”
