Grupo ABTV

[2] Juan Ballester Carmenates and Ileana Villazón used quotation and Appropriation (art) as a creative procedure as well as the use of curatorship as a critical structure in their exhibition El que imita fracasa (He Who Imitates Fails) that they presented in 1988 at Galería L in Havana.

The use of strategies such as quote and appropriation, as well as manipulation through exhibition curation, simulating institutional mechanisms capable of altering the functionality of each work, would be incorporated to a greater or lesser extent in all ABTV projects.

This strategy of manipulating through the curatorship of exhibitions and simulating the institutional mechanisms capable of altering the functionality of each work, would be incorporated to a greater or lesser extent in all ABTV projects.

For ABTV the National Museum presented the work of Raúl Martínez (artist) as a great socialist, colorful and pop propaganda billboard, which celebrated the social achievements of the Revolution while hiding the complex scaffolding of contradictions of a complex, at times violent, revolutionary process that the same artist had suffered and was somehow implicit in the author's representative irony.

The Proyecto Castillo de la Fuerza (Castle of The Force Project) In the late 1980s, the cultural life of Havana was shaken by a wave of young art critical of the tightness of the structures of the Cuban government.

Following the controversy, Armando Hart Dávalos, Minister of Culture, published an article in the official Granma (newspaper) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.

[note 7] Taking as a frame of reference the concerns of the Minister of Culture, its organizers, Félix Suazo, Alexis Somoza and Alejandro Aguilera, conceived it as “a project that would make it possible to carry out critical artistic proposals in a space for debate that would lay the foundations for later circulation broader social ”,[7] they were assisted by the former Vice Minister of Culture Marcia Leiseca who then chaired the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (CNAP) (National Council of Visual Arts).

[note 8] With irony, the Project took as its name the name of the building where it would be developed, the Castillo de la Real Fuerza (Castle of the Royal Force) of Havana, an old Spanish military fortress that, after having been the headquarters of different cultural institutions by then, functioned as an exhibition space attached to the National Museum of Fine Arts.

The exhibition overcame the initial control mechanisms and came to be installed in the Castle, but hours before the opening the alarm went off, the National Council of Visual Arts called an urgent meeting with Omar González[note 10] where the contents of some works were questioned because the Ministry of Culture found it problematic.

[note 11] ABTV ended its text of presentation of the catalog with the following self-critical reflection: "paradoxically, our criticism of the institutional framework could also be registered as institutional self-criticism", but the unexpected closure of Homage to Hans Haacke recalled that, even after a period of tolerance, censorship continued to be part of the repressive framework of the totalitarian regime, because "...In Cuba, as in any other regime of real socialism, censorship is a resource of the State, inscribed in the Constitution, the Penal Code and the laws".

The important thing was to accuse the institutional mechanism (commercial or political) that corrupted the semantic nature of the work (…) Even though it has not was opened, Homage to Hans Haacke is one of the key exhibitions of the 1980s in Cuba; and not precisely for the reasons that determined its cancellation.

Orlando Yanes is a painter promoted as an official artist by the Communist Party of Cuba, because his realistic work specializes in portraits of revolutionary heroes.

The Smile of Truth presented a large portrait of smiling Yanes in the billboard style of Che that he had designed for the facade of the building of the Ministerio del Interior (MININT) (Ministry of the Interior (Cuba)) in the Plaza de la Revolución (Revolution Square) and included his quote of 1963: “… we can count on a powerful source of inspiration such as our Revolution.

This work included a photocopy of the article by Jose María Juara "Hay razones para quemar un cuadro” (There are reasons to burn a painting) where the author explains the political reasons why he bought the painting El Pavo Real (The Peacock) by Manuel Mendive and later burned it in front of the Cuban Museum in Miami.

According to Juara, his burning was a symbolic way to protest against "the artists who still collaborate with Castro's tyranny" and against the sale of Cuban Marxist culture in Miami.

[11] For his work ABTV bought a serigraphy by Manuel Mendive to Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales (BFC) (Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets) and burned it as a performance that appropriated Juara's action.

[note 14] In An Image Travels the World, ABTV told the little-known story in Cuba of the photograph of Che Guevara taken by Alberto Korda that became famous thanks to the editing and marketing of the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

The Italian publisher visited Havana looking for the image that he would use on the cover of his publication of the Diario del "Che" in Bolivia and the Poster that would accompany the edition.

An Image Travels the World reproducing the famous photograph superimposed with its history and the work would be finished when it was sold - as a poster that recognizes itself as merchandise - for a three-peso bill.

parodied the ideological cynicism with which the Editora Política (Political Editor) advertised the achievements of social integration of the Cuban Revolution.

In this project, ABTV acted as curators of a choral group show that they inserted from a small cultural institution into the great official event of the IV Havana Biennial.