Havana based Tania Bruguera is meanwhile one of the most well known artists of Cuba. She works primarily with installations, but also with performances and drawings. Her work is a reflection on her cultural surroundings, in which she addresses the relationship between ideology and power (also from a clearly feminist perspective), but also emigration and postcolonialism. She thus belongs to the traditions of artists who pick up themes from cultural studies and translate through art in their work.

The idea for the installation Poetic Justice arose during a stay in India and reflects a colonial situation. The tea bag in India becomes a perfect metaphor for the relationship between colonial masters and the colonized, a relationship that can not only be described through (one-sided) economic transfers, but also through cultural takeovers and reinterpretations. Bruguera shows how the product of tea was brought to England as an Indian tradition and was reinterpreted there as an original British commodity. Back in India the tea mutated into something foreign – into an "elite" product of the colonial power. She inserts the historical level through eight tea bag-sized monitors, on which original film material from different times and places is shown.
51st Venice Biennale, 2005

Tania Bruguera, born 1968 in Cuba, lives and works in Havana and Chicago.
www.taniabruguera.com