Tania Bruguera

Summary of Tania Bruguera

Despite having been arrested, detained, incarcerated, and interrogated countless times due to the radical and defiant nature of her work, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera continues to create challenging performative works, as well as arts education and community outreach programs that aim to teach others that, as she asserts, "artists have the right to be respected and protected when they dissent." She is a courageous galvanizer of contemporary political art, who combined new frameworks for participatory art with a hard-hitting activist approach making art that can at times be controversial but is always poignant, challenging, and historically informed.

Accomplishments

• While Relational Aesthetics had been around for some time, Bruguera added a new dimension to it, bringing in real-world context, even conflicts, into art spaces. Bruguera's aim in this regard is to have "lived realities" confront the viewer and for familiar news images to "become real life experiences" for museum visitors who may not have had first-hand experiences of some situations - such as being corralled by riot control police.
• When she got arrested by Cuban authorities before the start of a planned performance, the international art world banded together to condemn the arrest and demand her release. The media coverage in this particular case - as well as the conversations and controversies that her other works engendered - can also be considered part of the work, which Bruguera used to her advantage as a political artist.
• Bruguera stands as an example of artistic integrity and the fight for freedom of expression, becoming a model for many younger artists in Cuba and the rest of the world. She is also heavily invested in education and pedagogy, which first started from her teaching art students but eventually expanded into artworks that function as social programs for marginalized communities - what she calls Useful Art.
• In all of her work, there is a reckoning with the complex history of her national identity and the political conditions in Cuba, of the sites where she performs, and of the legacies of colonialism and slavery in the contemporary world. Bruguera doesn't only allude to history in her work, but she creates layers of meanings "between histories," as analyzed by art historian Stephanie Schwartz.

The Life of Tania Bruguera

With a diplomat father who worked for the Castro government, Tania Bruguera grew up in Paris, Lebanon, and Panama before returning to Cuba at age 11, where the reality she encountered conflicted with the image of the country that the Cuban government had been projecting abroad. Trying to reconcile the two, she later said, planted the seeds of activist art-making in her, which especially started to take roots during her experience studying Performance art in the US after finishing a degree in painting in Cuba.

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Important Art by Tania Bruguera

Artwork Images

1986

Homenaje a Ana Mendieta (Tribute to Ana Mendieta)

In 1985, the Cuban-American Feminist artist Ana Mendieta died. That year, Bruguera, then a student, began to conceptualize a multi-part project that would be implemented over the next decade. In each part of the project, she recreated works and performances by Mendieta. The first of these was a recreation of Mendieta's work, Blood Trace (1974), in which the artist covered her arms with animal blood, and drew them downward on sheets of white paper creating a red V-shape. The resulting works were then left up in the gallery space as a visual marker to remind viewers about violence against women.

Bruguera started this site-specific series while she was working on her thesis at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. She wanted to bring Mendieta's work into public consciousness. Arts writer Tessa Solomon explains the series: "The act symbolically reclaimed Mendieta, who experienced a traumatic migration to the US as a child and who has traditionally been considered, largely with respect to US art history, for Cuba's artistic heritage."

The series also showcased Bruguera's promise as a young artist with historical awareness, political will, and deep knowledge of Feminist, Body Art, and Performance Art precedents, all of which would undergird her subsequent artistic output. In the process of creating this series, Bruguera also became an early practitioner of re-performance and reenactments, which have reinvigorated performance art discourse in recent years.

Performance re-creation series - Fototeca de Cuba, Havana, Cuba

Artwork Images

1997

El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt)

In this performance, which was part of the series Memorias de la Posguerra (Memories After the War), Bruguera stood naked for forty-five minutes with a headless lamb's carcass hanging from her neck, while she ate dirt mixed with water and salt meant to symbolize tears. The work was inspired by the legendary story of a group of Indigenous Cubans who committed mass suicide by consuming large amounts of soil as an act of rebellion under the Spanish Conquest. From this episode came the Cuban expression "eating land," which refers to a desperate situation from which there is no way out.

Bruguera remarks that "the Cuban Indians ate dirt as a weapon of resistance. They are from earth where they had been born, which is to say, they ate their ancestors, themselves, their history, their memory, as if they were committing a cultural suicide." The Burden of Guilt is "the recovery and realignment of this story," bringing it to the contemporary context and acknowledging her country's history and her guilt, as performance scholar José Esteban Muñoz puts it, "over colonial brutality and mass killing," which saw indigienous populations "wiped out during the shock of the colonial encounter." Arts writer and curator Edward Rubin notes that when the work was first performed in the artist's home in Havana during the Havana Biennial, "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."

A later work that Bruguera performed as part of the Memorias de la Posguerra (Memories After the War) series was El Cuerpo del Silence (The Body of Silence) (1997-98), which involved the artist sitting in a box filled with lamb meat while correcting, with a pen, a book of Cuban history, and then licking lamb meat off her naked body as an act of self-humiliation, before finally consuming the pages of the book itself as an act of self-censorship (the act of editing "official" Cuban history would likely have been punishable by law). Bruguera said: "Artists not only have the right to dissent, but the duty to do so. Artists have the right to dissent not only from affective, moral, philosophical, or cultural aspects, but also from economic and political ones."

Performance - Artist's home, Havana, Cuba

Artwork Images

2000

Untitled (Ingenieros de Almas [Engineers of the Soul])

This work was first staged in 2000 during the seventh Havana Biennial (the theme of which was "Closer to One Another") at the underground Cabaña Fortress, a military bunker that had been used as a prison, where many Cubans had been tortured and executed during Fidel Castro's regime. For the work, Bruguera covered the floor with rotting sugarcane bagasse, and lit the dark space with only a small television playing Castro-era propaganda videos. Sugarcane is particularly symbolic in Cuba, as its cultivation and exportation was historically connected to slavery, and because it has been used as an important symbol of Cuban national identity for many years. Bruguera thus intended the scent of the sugarcane to invoke an olfactory emotional response on the part of the viewer. As well, within the space, four nude men performed choreographed symbolic gestures such as bowing and cleaning off their bodies. Just a few hours into the performance, Cuban authorities shut it down on the basis that public male nudity was forbidden.

For Bruguera, the darkness of the space held a particular significance. She stated that "The long dark walk through the prison corridor provided time to think through your feelings, to explore your own ignorance of a place where the only light emanating from the image of the one man can be seen, not the eleven million people [over] whom he had the power." For arts writer Tessa Solomon, this work "embodies Bruguera's practice," which puts the spotlight on both "visible and invisible means of governmental oppression." Bruguera re-staged the performance in 2015 at the Venice Biennale, doing her best to recreate the multi-sensory elements of the original version, including the acrid odor of the rotting sugarcane, the physical and auditory crunch of it underfoot, and the presence of the original Cuban performers, in order to make it "feel authentic."

The second re-creation of the performance, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2020, had more of the element of "political-timing specificity" that Bruguera considered important to the work, since, as she explains, the first iteration in Havana had aimed to address "corruption and censorship during the Cuban Revolution." In 2020, the themes became "especially important to discuss in the Trump era." Unfortunately, Bruguera was unable to include the original Cuban performers in the New York re-creation due to governmental restrictions. However, an alteration made for this version involved permitting only four people to enter the space at a time, resulting in long lines of people cueing up to visit the work, which, according to curator Gabriela Rangel, "remind us of those [lines] that Cubans have to form in their everyday lives to buy bread, coffee or sugar."

Sugar cane bagasse, video (black and white, silent; 4:37 min.), and live performance - La Cabaña, Havana, Cuba

Artwork Images

2008

Tatlin's Whisper #5

For this performance, Bruguera invited two mounted, uniformed police officers to aggressively exercise crowd control techniques on Tate Modern visitors finding themselves on the bridge of Turbine Hall, the museum's central thoroughfare. These techniques included forcing people to move from one place to another, corralling them into small groups, asking them questions, and closing off entrances. As arts writer Tessa Solomon notes, "The performance, which occurred at unannounced times, was contingent on the participation of the museum's visitors, many of whom did little to resist the officers. The piece was an attempt to bring lived realities of some oppressed communities - police brutality, riot suppression - into an art space." Likewise, curator Tanya Barson asserts that "the work reflects on the complex relationship between agents of authority and the people they aim to control."

The title of Bruguera's Tatlin's Whisper series was inspired by Russian Constructivist artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, designer of the Monument to the Third International (1919-20), also known as Tatlin's Tower, a never-realized project meant to serve as a fully functional conference space and propaganda center for the Communist Third International. The series title alludes to "the intensity, credibility, and exaltation of socialist revolutions, just as Tatlin's tower, which was never built, were frustrated and utopia is rethought with the effort implied in a weak whisper," said Bruguera. From today's vantage point, explains journalist Yanet Pérez Moreno, "the series redefines [Tatlin's] practice based upon its failure and not its projected monumentality."

Tatlin's Whisper serves as an example of what Bruguera terms "Unannounced Performance" (in that no signage or audio announcements forewarned visitors of what was going to happen, eliciting, as art historian Jonah Westerman writes, "earnest confusion if not fear on the part of the viewer"). It is also part of Bruguera's "Behavior Art," which, according to her, is art that aims to "provoke" both viewers and institutions, and merges "with society and even with some psychological movements." As Bruguera explains, the intent behind her series was for familiar news images to "become real life experiences. She says specifically of Tatlin's Whisper #5, "The people do not have to know that it's art. [... Once] you know it's art, then you can do other associations, that are not exactly what you would do in your everyday life. So the fact that they are [...] having the same reaction they have in real life when they see the police controlling them, for me is very important." Bruguera sees this sort of work as examining "the relationship between apathy and anaesthetization of the images in the mass media." "The idea," she explains further, "is that next time spectators face a piece of news using similar images to those they experienced, they may feel an individual empathy with that distant event towards which they will normally have an attitude of emotional disconnection or informative saturation."

Tatlin's Whisper #5 was part of a larger weekend-long exhibition titled The Living Currency, during which the Tate's Turbine Hall was filled with other emotionally provocative works, for instance, with Spanish artist Santiago Sierra paying nine homeless women the cost of a night in a hotel room to stand facing a wall while viewers took their photos, and Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic hiring an actor to sit and cry while reading news stories. As Westerman notes, "The museum was a sea of bodies - some performing, more watching, many doing both. The bridge [where Bruguera's performance was staged] - a mezzanine level that affords views up and down the expanse of the ground floor from above - would have seemed an ideal place for both respite and an objective overview. However, as two mounted police officers arrived on the scene, the situation changed and escape was impossible. [... Visitors] became both subject and object of the performance."

Ten years later Bruguera would return to Tate Modern with a series of interventions in the museum space addressing the migration crisis, including a piece that induced tears from visitors using an organic compound in the air.

Mounted police, crowd control techniques, audience - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Artwork Images

2009

Tatlin's Whisper #6

For this controversial work, staged during the 2000 Havana Bienniel, Bruguera set up a microphone on a podium (guarded by one man and one woman in military uniform), on which audience members could "freely express their thoughts," uncensored, for one minute each. A white dove was placed on the shoulder of each speaker. The white dove alluded to the famous image of Fidel Castro, who had also worn one on his shoulder--as a symbol of peace and the fact that he was "the chosen" leader--while delivering his first speech after the Triumph of the Revolution, in Havana in 1959. Once each speaker's minute was up, one of the uniformed individuals removed the dove from their shoulder, signaling that it was someone else's turn. Although it took several minutes for the first speaker to gather the courage to take the podium, a total of thirty-eight others followed suit. The performance became a much-talked-about sensation. Bruguera notes that "The following day some people visited the place to see if the mikes were still open," and several similar performance strategies were enacted by other art groups in the following months.

While the various speakers presented widely differing political opinions, Bruguera reports that all were "accepted" and met with "respect." Yet the audience responses were also emotional and at times intense, with Bruguera stating that "It went from a person whose only reaction was to cry because she had had no other option than migrating because of her political differences, to declarations of members of the blogger movement in Cuba who have contributed when dissenting in virtual public spaces in the net. Some demanded those who were part of the secret police to come to the mike, others asked for a day when freedom of speech did not have to be a performance." An additional element of the performance included passing out 200 disposable cameras to audience members, so that they could be in charge of the documentation of the event, especially in the case that Cuban officials reacted with force or violence.

While Cuban authorities openly denounced the event as "anti-cultural," "shameful," and "offensive," Bruguera asserts that it "was conceived as an open structure pressing the limits of the institutions in power, where the responsibility rests with the audience that, to participate, must assume their role as citizens actively integrated to the political process [allowing] spectators [to] enjoy a sort of momentary democracy, almost as a rehearsal of what a plural society tolerating discrepancy as part of a project for civil society would be." "This piece, with its situationist and hyperrealist notions," she states "can go beyond representation spaces to work directly in and with reality."

In 2015, Tatlin's Whisper #6 was restaged in Times Square, New York City, while Bruguera herself was under house arrest in Havana. In the New York iteration, many spoke out against her detention, including artist Hans Haacke, art historian Claire Bishop, artist Dread Scott, curator RoseLee Goldberg, and artist Malik Gaines. Bruguera also staged subsequent versions of the performance in Kassel, Germany (2000), Bogotá, Colombia (2009), and Gaza in the Middle East (2009). Particularly in the cases of Colombia and Gaza, she notes that the work had an important social role, as "both are places highly defined by the view of 'the other,' a view that is almost unalterable and imposed and which is more an answer to the need of 'the other' in terms of political usefulness than the reality of the people belonging to the place of which this political imaginary is had." At the Bogotá iteration, Bruguera focused on bringing together a group of people who had been directly affected by the country's ongoing drug conflicts, and even had a tray of cocaine passed around the audience during the event, an act that was met with confusion by some, and outrage by others, while some individuals (unsurprisingly) engaged in use of the drug.

Stage, Podium, Microphones, 1 Loudspeaker inside and one outside of the building, 2 persons on a military outfit, White dove, 1 minute free of censorship per speaker, 200 disposable cameras with flash - Wifredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba

Artwork Images

2010-2015

Immigrant Movement International

Immigrant Movement International, a work supported by the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art, began with Bruguera spending a year living in a small apartment in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, shared by five immigrants and their six children. As arts writer Tessa Solomon explains, "during that time, she lived on a minimum wage, without health insurance, to better understand what many U.S. immigrants went through daily." The next stage of the project involved Bruguera and several volunteers engaging with local immigrant communities, as well as social service organizations, elected officials, and artists concerned with immigration reform in Queens, through public arts workshops as well as educational and support programs such as English classes, computer literacy classes, immigration law workshops, nutrition workshops, counseling services for victims of domestic abuse, and free healthcare and childcare programs, in order to "explore who is defined as an immigrant and the values they share, focusing on the larger question of what it means to be a citizen of the world."

Bruguera explains that these sorts of "longterm projects are educational processes and as knowledge evolves so does the project. These projects are about creating an ecology that embodies the desired change, where people can experiment with what they want before it is socially established, that is, before it becomes culture. [...] Long-term projects have an unstable form, a liquid form, so that they can adapt to the complexities they confront and to the outcomes of collective authorship." The project exemplifies what Bruguera terms "Arte Útil" ("Useful Art") or "ARTivism", that is, participatory and socially-engaged arts projects that center around the specific needs of community members, who are the ones who drive the project (as opposed to the artist).

As artist and writer Alex Kershaw explains, Useful Art "seeks to provide beneficial, timely and relevant solutions for those involved with its projects. In terms of aesthetics, its aim is to recast the viewer as a user, while individual artistic authorship is swapped out in preference of the potential for its participants to expropriate the work and make it their own. In these ways Arte Útil is more about working with reality rather than simply representing reality." Or, as Bruguera puts it, "Arte Útil doesn't represent - it presents, it proposes, and it implements." As such, projects such as Immigrant Movement International engage in discourses and debates about a genre of contemporary art variously referred to as "participatory art," "dialogical art," "activist art," "community-based art," and "socially-engaged art", most notably taken up by scholars Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, Yates McKee, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty. As Kershaw notes, these sorts of projects tend to be "risky, transformational, or even antagonistic," often going beyond the original "Relational Aesthetics" as coined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud, in which artworks stage experiences for viewers to interact and become social.

Immigration policies and laws, Immigrant Population, Elected Officials, Politicians, Community Organizations, Public Pressure, Media - Queens, New York, New York

Biography of Tania Bruguera

Childhood

Tania Brugueras was born the elder of two girls to Communist father Miguel Brugueras, who had been an underground militant during the Batista dictatorship and, from 1959 onward, worked as a diplomat and minister in the Fidel Castro government. Due to his work, the family moved often during Tania's childhood, living in Paris, Lebanon, and Panama. When she was eleven, Tania moved back to Cuba with her mother (an English translator), who had divorced her father.

She recalls that her mother had begun "to ask uncomfortable questions, such as, for example, why were they sending planes without seats full of very expensive things for Raúl Castro's wife paid with money that belonged to the town, while there was nothing to eat in Cuba. My mother had a utopian idea of the revolution and those things shocked her, and since she was impulsive and could take to saying things like that in front of anyone, my father's solution was to get away and send my mother, my little sister, and me from Panama back to Havana, without prior notice and without suitcases."

Back in Cuba, the family lived in the upscale Havana neighborhood of El Vedado. Young Tania was shocked by the disconnect between "the idyllic image of Cuba that the Government projects abroad" and the "real Cuba" she encountered. "I found it suspicious," says Bruguera, "that the government would try to sell an image to the world that portrayed everyone in Cuba as being happy with the agreement with the US." She cites this as the moment when the seeds of activist art-making were planted in her. "I couldn't reconcile reality with the projection I had of that reality. There is the root of my work," she states.

Brugueras studied at the Elementary School of Plastic Arts in Havana until 1983. She then continued her studies at the San Alejandro Fine Arts School until 1987. While there, at the age of eighteen, she changed her surname to Bruguera as a form of symbolic rebellion against her father, likely removing the "s" from the end of the surname to assert her independence and separate herself from the idea of being one of several "Brugueras". This act meant that she gave up any potential future inheritance.

Education and Early Training

In 1992, Bruguera received a degree in painting from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and later left Cuba to study in the United States, where she got her M.F.A. in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001. She continued to maintain her presence in Cuba by carrying out often controversial performance works and by working as a teacher at the Instituto Superior de Arte, where she taught until 2002. (She has also taught outside of Cuba, including in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, from 2003-2010, as well as the Università Iuav di Venezia in Venice and the National School of Fine Arts in Paris.)

Between the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of artists came up in Cuba, who led the way in updating the local scene with knowledge of contemporary art abroad, especially in the US and Europe. Cuban writer Rafael Rojas explains, "This was a generation that, while pertaining to the Soviet bloc, was aware of the most groundbreaking movements taking place in Western art, and attempted to assimilate and adapt them into the Cuban context." To him, Tania Brugera was "the most emblematic" of this transition in the art scene.

In 1993, Bruguera's own father, whom she had only seen a few days per year since she was a child, took her to be interrogated by authorities, after she made a newspaper with artists' texts for an exhibition. (It is forbidden to produce any form of independent publication in Cuba.) Her father confiscated all of the papers, and took her from her house, saying the same thing all police would say to her when they would take her for interrogation, "Let's go for a walk." He then put her in a car and drove silently to a house where two other men, whom her father referred to as "colleagues," began the interrogation. On this episode she says, "it was then when censorship became the core of my work."

Mature Period

In January 2003, Bruguera founded the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School), hosted by the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, with the aim of creating a space for the study and development of alternative art forms, and of showing Cuban students ways that they could use art to address hegemony and ideology. Institutional Critique played a significant role in the teachings of the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, which functioned as a two-year program with weekly workshops on "Behavior Art" and discourse. Bruguera also supported the careers of her students, notes art professor Adrian Anagnost, "by exhibiting their artworks as her own participation in the Havana Biennial." The program ran until 2009.

Bruguera has been arrested numerous times in Cuba, as her work often directly confronts the government. For instance, in 2014 when she organized a performance titled Tatlin's Whisper #6, which would've provided a platform for free speech in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución, she was arrested the morning before the performance was scheduled to start and charged with incitement to break the law, inciting public unrest, and resisting the authorities (although the latter charge was later dropped). Her passport was confiscated, and she was interrogated more than thirty times over the following months.

Several other artists and activists were also arrested for their plans to participate in that performance. When she was incarcerated that year, she recalls, "It was at that moment I learned that injustice has a way of manifesting itself physically and isn't just a concept. I stopped eating, not out of courage, but because I thought what was being done to me was unfair, and I had no other way of making that clear." She also recalls that the interrogations for that incident involved a great deal of "psychological violence."

In June 2015, Bruguera was able to get her passport back. She stayed in Cuba for a couple months, participating in several marches with the dissident group the Ladies in White, and then left the country in August. She pursued a Kickstarter campaign, through which she successfully raised over $100,000. The money was used to start the Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), which has its headquarters in her Havana home.

The Institute's stated mission is to "work with 'ordinary Cubans,' from housewives to professionals, from activists to students [...] to have a sample of Cuban society with people from different political spectra and levels of education. We want to work with the people who will be in charge of the construction of democracy in Cuba day by day, demanding their rights and fighting for social justice in their schools and jobs; transforming viewers into active citizens."

Bruguera was arrested again in December 2018, before a planned protest of a proposed Cuban law, "Decree 349", that would require all artists to apply for government licenses, as well as enable government officials to regulate artwork sales in the country and to prevent artists from addressing various subjects, including the "use of patriotic symbols that contravene current legislation," violence, and pornography. Bruguera, along with a number of other artists and activists who opposed the law, was imprisoned for three days, and then put on house arrest while the authorities worked to build a penal case against her. She decided to file a defamation lawsuit against the government.

Bruguera wears a tattoo on her right arm which shows the geographic coordinates of her home in Havana, as well as the date on which Castro left the presidency of Cuba, and a drawing of a skull pointing a gun at its temple, alluding to her 2009 work Self-Sabotage, in which she played Russian roulette in front of the public. "It reminds me," she says, "that every time I go to my country I have to remove my fear and go to the last consequences. Political art in Cuba is a Russian roulette, an all-or-nothing game in which you bet on losing everything."

In 2020, Bruguera reported hearing a high-pitched sound in her Havana home, which caused her high levels of physical distress. This phenomenon is well-documented and referred to as "Havana syndrome" following the first reports that surfaced in 2017 from American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba who suffered similar auditory symptoms, as well as sensations of pressure or vibration, with some extreme cases resulting in brain damage. "Havana syndrome" is generally believed to be the result of targeted attacks by the Cuban government, possibly through the use of microwaves or ultrasonic signals.

In March 2021, Bruguera was detained once again, for six hours in a Havana police station. She refers to the event as a "kidnapping," as she was forced into a vehicle by state security agents while running errands. In May 2021, she was one of six artists who requested that their work be removed from the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba as a form of protest against the imprisonment of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, another performance artista and outspoken critic of the Cuban government. Then, in July 2021, Bruguera herself was again detained and interrogated for eleven hours.

Bruguera has stated that she feels she is under constant surveillance, citing instances when friends who have visited her are soon after visited by "someone from the Government," as well as other instances in which individuals sitting near her in restaurants eat nothing and look at her constantly, or seem to wait on the sidewalk for her to come out of stores. She states, "I am not paranoid, but I know that I am a target of the Cuban government. They have classified me as an enemy, and there is no turning back." She currently splits her time between New York and Havana.

The Legacy of Tania Bruguera

Tate Modern director Frances Morris notes that "Bruguera is known for the original and compelling way in which she addresses the major political concerns of our time, not only in debates on art and art history, but also in the hope of bringing about real change in the world around us." Throughout her career, Bruguera fiercely defends her political beliefs though her performance, installation, and participatory art projects. Forcing awareness and reassessments of historical and current socio-political issues in Cuba, her legacy comes not only from her work itself, but also the media coverage of her numerous arrests, incarcerations, and interrogations by Cuban authorities, who view her work as a threat to their political system.

Bringing together art and activism, Bruguera's myriad artistic approaches, strategies, tactics, and philosophies (including "behavior art," "useful art," and "ARTivism") have also made her a trailblazer in terms of the form her art takes, particularly in the field of participatory art and related discourses, with her name already included in seminal texts on the topic, such as Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) by art historian Claire Bishop, who previously critiqued Relational Aesthetics for being removed from social context despite creating new experiences and social interactions.

Bruguera has influenced a new generation of artists in Cuba, the United States, and beyond, such as Celia Irina González Álvarez, Yunior Aguilar, Lazaro Saavedra, and Pussy Riot. This younger generation aims to combine social practice with artistic practice in order to have real-world effects on governmental policy as well as on the quality of life of ordinary citizens who experience disenfranchisement. In addition to her artworks, much of her influence has also come through her teachings, such as at the Cátedra Arte de Conducta in Havana, as well as the Asociación de Arte Útil, the Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt, and the Immigrant Movement International. National Plastic Arts Award laureate Lazaro Saavedra asserts that Bruguera will be "celebrated for her braveness and rebellious spirit in social media. [...] When she goes, she will be leaving behind her thousands of Cubans fighting for our civil rights, and as always there will be hundreds or thousands abroad pushing them."

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Artists

• Ana Mendieta
• Yoko Ono
• Marina Abramović

Friends & Personal Connections

• Coco Fusco
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena
• Tomás Sánchez
• Sandra Ceballos Olaya
• Marcos Castillo

Movements & Ideas

• Body Art
• Performance Art
• Institutional Critique
• Identity Art and Identity Politics

Artists

• Pussy Riot
• Celia Irina González Álvarez
• Yunior Aguilar
• Lazaro Saavedra

Friends & Personal Connections

• Coco Fusco
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena
• Tomás Sánchez
• Sandra Ceballos Olaya
• Marcos Castillo

Movements & Ideas

• Performance Art
• Institutional Critique
• Identity Art and Identity Politics
• Activist Art
• Participatory Art

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Tania Bruguera