Diango HernándezRevolution22.01. - 12.06.2006
Kunsthalle Basel
Diango Hernández, *1970 in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba,
works and lives in Dusseldorf and Havana
Photos © Diango Hernández / Lorenz Oeventrop
Courtesy Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Cologne
For his current solo exhibition, Diango Hernández (*1970, Sancti Spiritus, Cuba) has conceived a completely new installation extending along the first room of the ground floor of the Kunsthalle. This ambitious work combines a variety of media to construct an elaborate narrative that involves a number of sometimes common and sometimes deeply coded references to the history of the twentieth century, as well as to the developments in art that followed the dramatic and now to a large extent mythologized history of the revolution in Cuba.
Hernández’s take on revolution is based on the analysis of its iconography and of the rhetoric of its propaganda, as expressed in everyday language, political slogans and poster art. The installation uses domestic objects such as chairs and other office and home furniture, household objects, found images and vinyl records, all pierced by an iron water pipe, which simultaneously connects and destroys the objects set in the room. The pipe begins at the far end of the room, where it runs from two industrial tanks set atop an old fashioned kitchen cupboard, right to the very entrance of the room, with a water tap, dryly sticking out from an oil-painted door, standing free in the space. The system of bent and crooked pipes protects and controls the balance in the room; the design holds the space in a stiff totalising embrace. The domestic cosiness gives way to a unified appearance of state infrastructure.