Intercambio Cuba Australia Video Exchange

Diana Fonseca Quiñones’ practice is built on using simple, commonplace objects and experiences from daily life to devise narratives that mix reality and fiction. Drawing on seemingly irregular, everyday moment, such as sharpening a pencil or lighting a match, Quiñones’ work employs poetic metaphors that cleverly comment on broader social issues and universal human desire. She is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

Mia Salsjö graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2010 with qualifications in both Fine art (Masters) and music improvisation. Since then she has been practicing between Australia, Indonesia and Cuba, developing projects that interweave cross-cultural imagery, music notation and socio-political symbolism. Salsjo is currently working on a major project for the 2019 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba.

Adriana Arronte Rodríguez (b.1980) is based in Havana, Cuba, and graduated from Fine Arts, High Institute of Art (ISA), Cuba, in 2006 and from the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, Cuba, in 2001, prior to which, she studied at the School of Visual Arts José Antonio Díaz Peláez. Her practice includes installation, site specific performance and public interventions.

Susana Pilar Delhante MatienzoSusana Pilar Delahante Matienzo (b. 1984) lives and works in Havana, Cuba. Her work explores the obstacles and challenges that women face from both a personal and global perspective. Working mainly in video, photography, and drawing, Matienzo is unflinching in her approach to address the act and effects of violence against women, often producing powerful and disruptive visual images. From 1998 until 2008 Matienzo studied in the Elemental school of Visual Art, the Fine Arts Academy and the High Institute of Arts (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. She pursued post-graduate studies in New Media, from 2011 to 2013 at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany.

Robyne Latham’s work has, over a thirty-year period, traversed media and form, with a strong emphasis on the object in space, where space itself resides in a metaphysical realm. In the last decade Latham’s art practice has explored the principles of social sculpture, employing action, thought, and object.

Naivy PerézNaivy Pérez (Ciego de Ávila, Cuba, 1986) graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Her artistic process shifts from radical, lyrical performances to minimalist installations integrating new technologies. For years, she has worked on a series of performances in which she tries to embody a number of social roles associated with the Cuban woman (housewife, brave soldier, prostitute, etc). In addition, she explores the world of Net art, often in collaboration with the artist Rewell Altunaga and Rodolfo Peraza as part of Neturn collective designing interactive works that include motion or light sensors.

Angela Tiatia explores contemporary culture, drawing attention to its relationship to representation, gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of the body and place, often through the lenses of history and popular culture. Tiatia's work has been included in a number of important institutional exhibitions, including After the Fall, National Museum of Singapore (2017/2018); Personal Structures, 57th Venice Biennial (2017); Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT 8), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2015/16); as well as Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand, Toi Art, Gallery of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand (2018). She is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf in Sydney, Australia.

Damian SmithDr Damian Smith is a freelance curator, arts writer and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. A former resident of Habana, his doctoral dissertation – Barefoot Curating: Contemporary Art and the Role of the Freelance Curator – draws largely on his experience working with the Bienal de la Habana and associated cultural institutions. In 2016 the State Library of Victoria established the Damian Smith Archive, which contains approximately 200 published essays on contemporary art, along with additional artworks and ephemera. In 2016, Smith was an invited guest speaker at the UNESCO–sponsored International Association of Art Critics World Congress, held at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Habana, Cuba.