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El peso de la culpa (The weight of guilt)

Works

Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Tania Bruguera, El peso de la culpa (The weight of guilt), 1997-1999

Tania Bruguera Cuba, b. 1968

El peso de la culpa (The weight of guilt), 1997-1999
Chromogenic Print
59 x 38 inches
149.9 x 96.5 cm
Edition 1 of 3
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  • El peso de la culpa (The weight of guilt)

Visualisation

On a Wall
Tania Bruguera’s 'The Weight of Guilt' (1997), from her landmark Postwar Memories series, is a harrowing ritual of national atonement in which the artist’s body becomes the living archive of...
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Tania Bruguera’s "The Weight of Guilt" (1997), from her landmark Postwar Memories series, is a harrowing ritual of national atonement in which the artist’s body becomes the living archive of Cuba’s foundational violence. Inside her own Havana home, Bruguera stands barefoot before her audience, the decapitated carcass of a lamb draped across her torso like a blood-soaked vest of sacrificial armor over a simple white garment. Behind her hangs a monumental Cuban flag woven entirely from human hair—an ancestral shroud that silently indicts the nation’s origins. In a slow, deliberate, almost mechanical ceremony, she leans over vessels containing native Cuban soil, salt, and water, mixing the earth and brine in her hands before consuming it mouthful by mouthful for nearly an hour. Through this prolonged act of geophagia, Bruguera enacts a radical gesture of empathy, physically identifying with the near-vanished Taíno who once ate the island’s soil as both desperate sustenance and final, suicidal resistance against Spanish colonial conquest and cultural erasure. By ingesting the very land that defines Cuba, she internalizes the guilt embedded in its foundations, transforming her body into the literal site where personal endurance merges with collective shame. The performance asserts that true historical reckoning cannot remain intellectual or symbolic; it demands corporeal sacrifice—the voluntary, sustained consumption of the soil that both nourishes and accuses its people—offering the possibility of redemption only through the painful incorporation of what the nation has long tried to forget.
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Exhibitions

“6th Havana Biennial” (parallel action at the artist’s home, Tejadillo 214), Havana, Cuba, 1997 (The original performance El peso de la culpa / The Weight of Guilt was realized privately at the artist’s residence during the period of the official biennial; chromogenic prints documenting the forty-five-minute action were subsequently produced and exhibited.)


“Desde el cuerpo: Alegorías de lo femenino,” Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela, opened February 15, 1998 (The chromogenic print documenting the 1997 performance was exhibited.)


“Tania Bruguera: Esercizio di Resistenza,” Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, November 27, 2003 – January 24, 2004.


“Portraits,” Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany, July 22 – September 17, 2006.


“For sale / A la venta,” Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid, Spain, November 2006.


“Arte no es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960–2000,” El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, United States (and touring venues), 2008.


“Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary,” Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, NY, United States, January 28 – April 11, 2010 (Dedicated survey exhibition featuring the chromogenic print and related performance documentation from the Weight of Guilt series.)


“Valoarte International Art Exhibition,” Museo de Arte Costarricense, San José, Costa Rica, 2012 (Related version of the work presented.)


“Mana Miami,” Mana Wynwood, Miami, FL, United States, 2015.

Literature

“Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas,” edited by Coco Fusco, Routledge, London and New York, 1999 : pages 152–153 (illustrated and discussed as a key work in the volume.)


“Cuba: Maps of Desire,” edited by Eugenio Valdés Figueroa et al., Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 1999 : pages 156–157 (discussed and illustrated.)


“Art Cuba: The New Generation,” edited by Holly Block, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2001 : page 52 (illustrated.)


“Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform,” edited by Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003 (discussed and illustrated in the chapter “Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt.”)


“Tania Bruguera: Esercizio di Resistencia,” edited by Roberto Pinto, bilingual Italian/English edition, Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin, 2003 (discussed and illustrated.)


“Performance: Live Art Since the 60s,” by RoseLee Goldberg, Thames & Hudson, London and New York, 2004 (discussed and illustrated.)


“Tania Bruguera,” La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2005 (official exhibition catalogue for the 51st International Art Exhibition – The Experience of Art, curated by María de Corral.)


“Tania Bruguera,” Galería Juana de Aizpuru / La Biennale di Venezia, Madrid, 2006 (softcover, bilingual).


“Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection,” edited by Abelardo Mena Chicuri, 2007 : page 57 (discussed pp. 54–58) (illustrated and discussed.)


“Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary,” edited by Helaine Posner, Gerardo Mosquera, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Charta / Neuberger Museum of Art, Milan and Purchase, 2009 (dedicated monograph/catalog accompanying the 2010 exhibition; discusses and illustrates the work as a foundational piece.)


“To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art,” by Rachel Weiss, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011


“Great Women Artists,” Phaidon Press, London and New York, 2019 : page 79 (mentioned and illustrated.)


“The Sense of Brown,” by José Esteban Muñoz, Duke University Press, Durham, 2020 : Chapter 9 (“Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt”), pages 86–99 (dedicated chapter discussion.)


“Tania Bruguera: Let Truth Be, Though the World Perish,” edited by Diego Sileo, 2020 (discussed and illustrated as a key early work.)

Provenance

Estudio Brugera > Private Collection, Madrid Spain 
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