Profile of Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera is a political and interdisciplinary artist who focuses on behavior as the principal resource of her work and who studies ways of delivering information in art such as rumor. Bruguera calls this Arte de Conducta. She sees Art as an experience (both physical and psychological), as a free space where things are possible even if only in a specific timeframe, place or for a particular group of people. Her work is often of an ephemeral nature because of the use of live actions and/or fragile materials, but also because of the ephemeral condition of any political "truth".

Bruguera has been a participant at Documenta 11, as well as in several biennales such as Venice, Johannesburg, Sao Paolo, Shangai, Havana, and Site Santa Fe. Her work has also been exhibited in numerous museums including: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum; Museum für Moderne Kunst; Helsinki Art Museum; The Whitechapel Art Gallery; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes; The Kunsthalle Wien; Stedjlick Museum von Actuele Kunst; and The Institute of International Visual Art among others.
She has lectured extensively internationally among others at The New School in New York, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, The Royal College of Art in London and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1998 she was selected as a Guggenheim fellow (USA). In 2000 she received the Prince Claus Award (The Netherlands). She received her MFAs from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA) and Instituto Superior de Arte (Cuba).

She currently lives and works between Chicago and Havana. She is the founder / director of Arte de Conducta, the first performance studies program in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and is faculty at The University of Chicago. In her 1997 performance for the 6th Havana Biennial, El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt), she stood before her own home in Old Havana. The house was draped with a Cuban flag which she had herself woven from human hair. With a butchered lamb hung around her neck, she ate Cuban soil mixed with water. As she later explained, this performance was an allusion to a COLLECTIVE suicide practiced by the island's natives. By eating large quantities of earth, many took their own lives when faced with the threat of the Spanish conquistadores.

• Weblinks
• Video, Threads of the Woven Maze
• Portfolio, Iturralde Gallery