Tania Bruguera
198.1 x 111.8 cm
Further images
Tania Bruguera's "Untitled (Kassel)" serves as a preparatory drawing for her immersive installation at Documenta 11 in the Binding Brewery, where the work confronts the visceral remnants of state violence through a performative orchestration of sensory deprivation: visitors navigated alternating total darkness and blinding light, their sight withheld while auditory cues—such as the ominous stamping of military boots and the mechanical assembly of rifles—evoked the terror of authoritarian control and historical erasure. The drawing itself inscribes a chronological litany of 26 massacres and genocides from 1945 to 1968, commencing post-World War II and encompassing acts perpetrated by governments or individuals, with a stark emphasis on the pervasive interconnections to United States governmental involvement, thereby transforming the textual enumeration into a mnemonic indictment that challenges the myth of post-war resolution and exposes the continuum of imperial complicity in local atrocities. Conceptually, this interplay between the drawing's archival austerity and the installation's embodied disorientation interrogates the mechanisms of power's obfuscation, positing art as a site of ethical resistance where fragmented memories demand accountability, blurring the lines between documentation and lived trauma to provoke a reevaluation of collective amnesia in the face of systemic brutality.
Provenance
Estudio Bruguera > The Collection of Jean-Pierre Pastor > DF CollectionExhibitions
Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2002). The performative/installation version of Untitled (2002) was presented at Documenta 11.
Maintenant, ici, là-bas. Frac Loraine. Metz, France. Curated by Beatrice Josse. (catalogue). September 16 – November 5, 2006.
Move: Choreographing You (2010, London), curated by Stephanie Rosenthal.
Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, (2010).
Publications
Tania Bruguera. By Stephanie Mauch. Documenta 11_Platform 5: Ausstellung/Exhibition. Ed. Hatje Cantz Verlag Publishers, 2002. (Ilust.) p. 50 ISBN 3-7757-9087-X.
Tania Bruguera: Cuba, performance and society’s relationship to its history. By Jonathan Griffin. Frieze, Issue 118, October 2008. (illust.) pp. 286 – 287. ISSN 9-770-962-067014.
Juliane Krüger & Tania Bruguera (interview). By Juliane Krüger. XXD11. Ed. Bernhard Balkenhol, Heiner Georgsdorf, Pierangelo Maset. Texts by various authors. Ed. Kassel University Press. (illust.) pp.76 – 79. ISBN 3-89958-506-2.
A Performance Artist and Her Greatest Hits. By Benjamin Genocchio. New York Times, NY/Region, Art Review/Westchester. Published February 12, 2010. New York, United States (illust.).
Tania Bruguera: Untitled (Kassel, 2002). By André Lepecki. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Move: Coreographing you, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Ed. Published by Hayward Publishing, October 2010. Arts Council, London, England (illust.) pp. 90 – 93. ISBN 978-1-85332-282-2.
The CNN Documenta. By Kim Levin. The Village Voice. July 9, 2002. p. 57.
Tania Bruguera; Her Place an Her Moment. By Yuneisky Villalonga. Maintenant, Ici, La-Bas [Now, Here, Over There], Frac Lorraine. 2007(illust.) pp.74 – 95. ISBN 978-2-911271-11-3.