If the purpose of art is to make an impression on the viewer, then Tania Bruguera in her performance and installation works has reached the sublime level in the arts. One need not look far to see the artist, fully exposed as herself and as a symbol of Cuban identity in all of her work. We see the artist struggle, commit herself to gruesome acts, and subject herself to a mélange of circumstances as she makes a political statement in the name of her fellow Cubans and a personal expression of her own deep emotions.
Tania is the top performance artist in Cuba and yet does not limit her work or socio-political critique to the island. She has taken her performance as far as India, where she produced a series of works with used tea bags to protest colonization and oppression in India where she lived and worked for a while in 2001. She has done the unimaginable such as creating an 8 ft. tall Cuban flag out of human hair. She not only creates a statement based on her own concepts and political beliefs, but she invites the audience to participate in the artistic creation. In the India pieces, she invited people to consume tea and sew their used teabags to a long coat which she later wore in a performance. In the Cuban flag, after exhausting the extent of her own hair and that of her friends, she invited her neighbors to donate their own hair to the work, quite a feat in a country where the Santeria belief is that giving someone possession of your hair is giving them power over you.
In all of her performance pieces the viewers are subjected to their own reaction to the work as a part of the artistic process. The act of creating her pieces is based on ceremony and ritual, from the birth of an idea, to the creation of the materials, to their use in live performance: Tania has made her art alive and real, confronting and skewing the boundaries between art and politics, participant and observer.
Tania has had solo exhibitions in San Francisco, New York, Belgium, Guatemala, Havana, and London. She has participated in group shows throughout Europe, the U.S. and Latin America; she represented Cuba in the Venice Bienal of 2002, Documenta (2002), Sao Paulo Biennial (1996) and participated in several Havana Biennials since 1994.
She was the founder of the performance art program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, was invited as faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute, was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a professor of painting at the Institute of Art, Havana . Tania lives and works in Havana, Cuba and Chicago, Illinois.