Hilary Thurlow

Exploring the life and work of the Cuban artist and political activist, Tania Bruguera.

As globalisation—personified by networks of global capital, low-cost international travel and mass migration—has accelerated in recent decades, so too have biennials and other large-scale surveys of ‘global’ art.  My research centres on the work of the Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera (born 1968), whose practice and profile have emerged within and from this acceleration.

Bruguera has notably participated in some of contemporary art and exhibition history’s most influential projects: documenta11 (2002), the Venice Biennale (2005), Gwangju Biennale (2008) and the Johannesburg Biennale (1997). Additionally, she has exhibited at some of the world’s most renowned museums: Tate Modern, London (2018), MoMA, New York (2015) and the Guggenheim, New York (2014). Yet despite this storied exhibition history, there is no scholarly monograph on Bruguera in either English or Spanish: this is the gap my research seeks to fill.