Tania Bruguera

Performers wearing military fatigues placed a white bird upon each speaker's shoulders, referencing the famed incident when a dove rested on Fidel Castro's shoulder during his speech declaring revolutionary victory in January 1959.

Various of the attendees use the opportunity to ask for “freedom” and “democracy”.

One of these was the renowned dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez.

The Cuban government denounced this in a statement saying that it considered “this to be an anti-cultural event of shameful opportunism that offends Cuban artists and foreigners who came to offer their work and solidarity."

Tania Bruguera (born 1968 in Havana, Cuba ) is a Cuban artist and activist who focuses on installation and performance art.

She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she works as head of media and performance at Harvard University.

Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions.

her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.

Bruguera's work pivots around issues of power and control, and several of her works interrogate and re-present events in Cuban history.

As a result of her artistic actions and activism, Bruguera has been arrested and jailed several times.

She was born Tania Brugueras, the daughter of diplomat and politician Miguel Brugueras, but aged 18 changed her name to Bruguera, "her first act of political rebellion".

With her father being a diplomat and minister in the Fidel Castro government, Tania moved three times throughout her childhood.

Her father's career took the family to Paris (1973–1974), Lebanon (1974–1977), and Panama (1977–1979).

In 1979, two years after her third move, Bruguera decided to return to Cuba.

Bruguera studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and then earned an M.F.A. in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She is the founder and director of Catédra Arte de Conducta (behavior art school), the first performance studies program in Latin America, which is hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana.

In 1985–96, after the death of Ana Mendieta, Bruguera created a series of performances titled Tribute to Ana Mendieta, a site-specific piece in which Bruguera recreates objects and performances created by Mendieta.

Bruguera's 1997 work The Burden of Guilt (El peso de la culpa) was the artist's take on a story of mass suicide of a group of indigenous Cubans who have consumed large amounts of soil in order to show their resistance to the Spanish occupation.

Bruguera interpreted their act of eating dirt as "a weapon of resistance."

In her performance, Bruguera stood, naked, with a lamb carcass hanging from her neck, creating both a physical and symbolic burden.

For 45 minutes, she consumed soil mixed with water and salt, representing tears.

As Edward Rubin described it, "the harrowing piece was first performed in Havana, where the audience was duly reminded that freedom, liberty, and self-determination are not abstract ideals, but achievements that deeply inscribe their meaning on our physical being."

In 1998–1999 Bruguera created a behavior art piece titled "Destierro"(Displacement).

This piece of work resembles the power figure ‘Nikis Nkonde’ and is supposed to draw attention to the empty promises the Cuban government made to its people during the revolution.

With this piece of art Tania calls upon the Cuban people to take an active stance and demand that the Cuban government finally fulfill their promises.

In 2002 Bruguera founded the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School) in Havana to provide a space for the training of alternative art studies in contemporary Cuban society.

The focus of the Cátedra was to educate young Cuban artists on diverse styles of art, and to show how art could be used as a tool for the transformation of ideology.

Additionally, the Cátedra itself can be understood as an artwork in the manner of institutional critique, social practice, or parasitism, with Bruguera re-formulating the institutional frameworks of the Cuban national art school, the Havana Bienal, and the money- and influence-fueled international art circuit to unintended purposes.

"Using her position within this social milieu, Bruguera advanced the careers of her [Cátedra] students by exhibiting their artworks as her own participation in the Havana Bienal."

From 2003 through 2010, she was an assistant professor at the Department of Visual Arts of the University of Chicago, United States and is an invited professor at the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice, Italy.

In 2021 Bruguera departed Cuba in exchange for the government to free activists imprisoned in that year after she got the job offer at Harvard University.

Bruguera's performance in Havana at the Havana Biennial of Tatlin's Whisper #6 2009 generated great controversy.

During the performance Bruguera put up a microphone and told people in attendance they could say whatever they wanted for one minute.

In 2011, Bruguera began working on Immigrant Movement International, a multi-part artwork expected to continue through 2015.

Bruguera began in 2011 by spending a year living in a small apartment in Corona, Queens, with five immigrants and their children.

She was interested in experiencing some problems immigrants without residency papers encountered trying to survive on low pay and without health insurance.

The project, funded by the Queens Museum of Art and a nonprofit arts group called Creative Time, also involved opening a storefront in New York where Bruguera wanted to hold arts workshops for immigrants, but found that most of the people who came to the store were interested in learning English or help finding employment or legal aid.

In 2012, she presented Surplus Value, a participatory work as part of the larger project of Immigrant Movement International at Tate Modern.

In order to enter Surplus Value, museum visitors waited in a long line, and they were required to pass a polygraph test about their visa applications.

The exhibition space contained four reproductions of signs from Nazi labor camps.