Open Studio
Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art invites to meet three Cuban residents. Luis Eligio D Omni and David Escalona D Omni will present the actions by the Omni-Zonafranca interdisciplinary art collective and their latest works of music, video, photography, and performance. As part of the Open Studio, Jesús Hdez-Güero will show his Under the Counter installation comprising his photographic works done during his visit to Poland.
The Omni-Zonafranca group was established 17 years ago and is famous for its unconventional actions in public spaces and experimental concerts compositing visual arts, music, poetry, and social activism. Omni-Zonafranca is well known at home and abroad for their social activism. The group’s activities in Cuba are continually censored, controlled, and repressed in view of their social impact and the fight for human rights and freedom of expression.
The Calados Capitales en Lugares de Paso is a long-term project by Jesús Hdez-Güero, initiated in 2012 in Cuba and Venezuela. The buildings and monuments featured on the banknotes of the countries visited by the artist mark his travel route to subsequent towns and cities. Güero locates and photographs them through the holes cut out in the banknotes, so that the brick-and-mortar objects perfectly fit in and replace their pictures. The other project Época incorrecta para escritores célebres [Bad Times for Famous Writers] was realized at the Warsaw University Library. This is the result of the artist’s research into the status of Polish writers under the communist rule. The photographs comprised by this cycle show the spines of the books dedicated to the communist era and being part of the Warsaw University Library’s book collection. The vertical axis that runs through the stacked books creates from the letters on their spines the names of Polish writers active as selected by the artist. Their works, repressed in the communist era, were distributed "under the counter".
