Continua Gallery also brings Cuban art to Art Basel

It is impossible to go unnoticed. Not only because of the extensive history it has as a participant in this fair, or its various venues in the world, but because the proposals of Continua Gallery are always powerful, renovating and conceptually solid.

Arte por Excelencias, in its tour of the fairgrounds, discovers it and stops to talk with Luisa Ausenda and her work experience, mainly at the Havana headquarters in Continua.

Luisa, you are exhibiting at the fair one of the works that is having more visits, but I guess that is not new for you who have been in several editions of Art Basel ...

We have been coming to Miami for many years; I think we started with the fair since its first edition. The particular thing about this is that after 4 years working in Havana, as a permanent project in Cuba, we wanted to dedicate half of our stand to Cuban art. On one hand we are presenting international artists -among them Anish Kapoor and his album that has been nominated one of the most photographed works of the fair-, and on the other, twelve Cuban artists: Carlos Garaicoa, Leandro Feal, Osvaldo González, José Manuel Mesías , Yoan Capote and Iván Capote, José Yaque, Alejandro Campins, Elizabet Cerviño, Susana Pilar, Luis López-Chávez and Reynier Leyva Novo.

We are presenting the works inside and outside the stand and in the middle there is an installation by the French artist Daniel Buren, because from this creator in Havana we also have a permanent public art project: nineteen doors from Havana that were presented in the 12th. Biennial and that has been since then a gift for the city, because in Old Havana and in Center Havana there are these doors of domestic buildings that have been intervened by the artist.

On the other side of the stand, towards the corridor, there is a work by Michelangelo Pistoletto that has to do with that famous performance he did in the church of Paula also in the 12th. Biennial of Havana breaking the mirrors. This performance resulted in an installation called "Thirteen Less Two" and presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, during his personal exhibition in 2016, then donated to that institution. The work that we show here, is a similar work but of the 2017 with 9 mirrors and also has to do with that performance of the author.

That is, we have two non-Cuban artists - Michelangelo Pistoletto and Daniel Buren - who are the ones who best represent our experience in Cuba in the last 4 years, because with them we have done more projects than with the others, although we invite Cuba to different artists of all kinds. Right now, for example, we have an Italian in the convent of the Basílica de San Francisco de Asís, another creator in the Museum of Fine Arts, and an artist from Belgium in the Gallery.

Did you tell me that you organize exhibitions prior to Art Basel Miami?

The idea, since we are in Cuba, has been to take advantage of the wave of public art that visits Art Basel Miami. Then just before the fair - at the end of November or beginning of December - we usually organize a large number of exhibitions. We always have a show in the gallery - we try to inaugurate 3 or 4 per year-, then during Art Basel Miami there are also projects outside the gallery in collaboration with other institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts or the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center or alone, and we open exhibitions of Continua Gallery artists who are interested in having something in Havana.

And how do you take these people? Do they go on their own, you organize an event, ...?

We send invitations to those who have told us during the year that are interested in visiting Cuba, also through the invitations that we usually send through our mailing lists so that people find out and from there they contact us, tell us if they are going to be in Cuba and we welcome them.

And the visits are usually before the fair or after?

There are people who come later. Now, for example, there will be a group, they are students but the idea is that, the gallery will attend them. There are people who come to Cuba and want to know a little more about art and they are professionals of all kinds, people who simply move to this part of the world and decide to take advantage of the trip, the proximity. What is more common is that they go to Cuba before the fair because we inaugurate and like to be present at the events.

When you do these inaugurations, you accompany these people and create circuits in the city to show them artists?

Yes, what we do, more than that, is to inaugurate intelligently. Then we cite two exhibitions in Old Havana and one or two in Vedado: the two in Old Havana open on Friday, the ones in Vedado, on Saturday and we just do the circuit, it is a mental thing, not physical, we do not have to take the people there, they come on their own.

Before concluding the visit to the Continua Gallery stand, we can enjoy the works of Pascale Marthine Tayou, an artist from Cameroon who exhibited during Art Basel last year.

In addition to the Hotel Roma series by Cuban Leandro Feal. About her, Luisa tells us:

Hotel Roma was a bar that settled for a time in that old hotel in Old Havana located in Aguacate corner O'Reilly. Leandro was photographing people there for a long time so in the series there is everything; for example, the collection of the Cisneros, there may be a photo of me, a photo of him, because many of us have passed by there. It is a portrait of the moment, as historical for those of us who live there.