Bio
Consuelo
Castañeda uses painting, installations, photography, graphic art,
architecture, and print to explore the relationship between art and
politics in Cuba and in wider Latin America. During the
so-called “prodigious decade” of the eighties in Cuba until her
emigration to Mexico and then Miami, in the 1990s, she was an active
piece on the Cuban art scene and at the Instituto Superior de Arte
(ISA). Not only as an artist but as professor and critic as well, she
became then a sort of pivotal figure. Her analytical mind together
with an eclectic use of a variety of formats have been key elements
to her poetics. Appropriation, remixing, reusage are some of the
techniques displayed by Castañeda in order to fashion new narratives
of both great formal sophistication and subtle irony. Wielded from a
Third World country, this postmodern appropriative attitude proposed
eroding all historically accepted canons and recycling them for
innovative expressive purposes, instilling her conceptual works with
a sensitive but objective distance. Her work as a painter,
photographer and multimedia installation artist has recently shifted
to digital format. Her current focus is on creatin interactive works
tha anyone with a modem and a computer can readily access.
Consuelo
Castañeda (b. 1958, Havana, Cuba) is based in Miami and Havana. She
has participated in several solo and collective exhibitions in USA,
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, among other venues. The artist
participated in the Havana Biennials in 1984, 1986 and 1991. In 2016,
she held a solo show entitled CCC2016in
Havana after decades away from the island.