Belize Represents at the Havana Biennial

Art and the City

Belize joins 36 countries and over 100 artists at the 9th Havana Biennial

Monday March 27th, 2006

This evening the Morro Cabana Fortress in Havana, Cuba was host to the opening ceremonies of the 9th Havana Biennale. Some three thousand guests, visitors, artists, and curators gathered in the late evening for official ceremonies involving live classical and modern music, art performances and the simultaneous opening of over 50 spaces where artists from across the globe are presenting contemporary works of visual art.

Belize is represented with the North Front Street Project, a collective undertaking by artists Richard Holder, Santiago Cal and Yasser Musa and curated by Joan Duran.

Excerpts from Granma International Staff Writer Mireya Casteneda (March 26,2006)

The Havana Biennale, in its ninth edition, is a sign of spring for the visual arts and once again converts the capital into one great gallery. As has been the tradition since 1984, the encounter is marked “not only by the diversity of works, but also by the opening of new spaces of a public, representative or common nature.”

On this occasion the general theme is the Dynamics of Urban Culture and the intention is – according to cirtic Nelson Herrera Ysia – is not just to place works of art in those spaces but to have them participate in the very context of the work, as well as with people living or moving about in the framework of the city, thus provoking an interaction that is not fictitious or imposed.”

The Cuban capital is thus “generously offering its spaces so that artists can find a new and creative support for their practices and strategies, as much in its historic quarter as in its modern districts.”

Artists from Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic and Trinidad-Tobago are participating for Latin America and the Caribbean.

All the exhibitions of artists invited to the Biennale or the special ones are related to urban culture, a theme magnificently selected by the curators because, to quote Herrera Ysla: “just by walking through any city we receive a universe of signs and symbols infinitely superior to those found in many museums and art galleries. The city is here and now, and has always been the finest place in the world in terms of influences or visual impacts on spectators without distinction of origin or social class.”

Except from the North Front Street catalogue

North Front Street Project

Belize has a five year history of contemporary art participation at the international level starting in March 2000 with the presentation of ZERO- new Belizean art in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. This presentation The North Front Street Project is the first such collective enterprise by Belizean artists. All three artists belong to the current generation, and make art in different formats. Santiago Cal is a sculptor, Richard Holder a photographer and Yasser Musa a conceptual artist.

The North Front Street Project combines the “White Dogs” of Cal, “The Street People” of Holder and “historical and contemporary images, text and objects” of Musa. The Project is pixels that make up a single scan of a street holding over 300 years of memories.

The White Dogs

North Front Street is a main artery in Belize City. It is the landing point of cruise tourists, and the selling point of drug dealers. Half the street is open to traffic in both directions and the other half is one way. The Street is full of stray and mangy dogs of all breeds, sizes and colors. Cal’s “White Dogs” are sterilized beasts whose potency resides in their contorted posture. The “Dogs” are dancing on a tight string as in limbo neither alive nor dead. The Street is the theatrical stage where the dogs expand our image of abandonment and contrast.

The Street People

Holder’s images of men in the act of becoming wasted by alcohol show the street as one grand bar. The liquor portraits are unkind memorabilia of persons connected to a desolate urban environment. Their isolation is celebrated. While Cal’s “Dogs” offers distance Holder’s images serves up a deranged intimacy. The nighttime lonesomeness of Holder’s characters contrasts with the regular daytime combustion of thousands of North American tourists and local vendors engaged in a free for all bazzaar hot and sweaty with the smell of coconut sun block.

History Absorbed

Musa’s scan of the street combine historical rum bottles linked metaphorically to Holder’s modern Belikin beer bottles with images of the street spanning almost 100 years. He looks at the street like a train track with the rails representing a merge of colonial architecture and ferroconcrete modern buildings. Musa’s work offers projections and installations to the meta-narrative of the Street as a colonial framework morphing into a post-modern tourism buffet table. The Street began as a way station for wood to be transshipped to England. The Street was built on swamp and is bordered by the Halouver Creek and empties at its end into the Caribbean Sea. So today the street that once saw the departure of wood once departed now welcomes over 1 million cruise tourists. Musa’s presentation attempts to portray the street as a pulsing vibration of history and urban soaked life.