NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art has acquired Tania Bruguera's Untitled (Havana 2000), a major performance and video installation that was conceived for and shown at the VII Bienal de La Habana in 2000. The first in a series made by the artist and presented in cities around the world between 2000 and 2009—with each piece in the series featuring a different performance addressing the sociopolitical memory of the city in question—it is a landmark of the artist's early career, and the first work by Bruguera to enter MoMA's collection. Untitled (Havana, 2000) was acquired through The Modern Women's Fund Committee and the Committee on Media and Performance Art Fund.

Bruguera (Cuban, b. 1968), one of the foremost figures in contemporary art, works with performative, installation-based, and experiential art forms. Though the seeds of Bruguera's practice grew out of socially conscious Cuban art of the 1970s and 1980s and the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta, Carlos Cárdenas, and the Arte Calle Group, her work is equally indebted to Joseph Beuys's notion of "social sculpture," Allan Kaprow's happenings, and Carolee Schneemann's performances.

At the Havana Biennial in 2000, Untitled (Havana, 2000) was installed in the Cabaña Fortress, a military facility used as a jail for prisoners of conscience during the Cuban Revolution. This large-scale installation consists of a long, cave-like corridor whose floor is covered with decomposed sugarcane. Immersed in darkness and the odor of fermentation, visitors are drawn to a faint light produced by an ordinary television monitor showing previously televised and private scenes of Fidel Castro.

Within the darkness, four naked Cuban men are visible, each enacting a series of gestures of humility, uncertainty, and servitude. Juxtaposed with the Castro footage, their movements are intended to suggest that any discourse in post-Revolution Cuba is nothing more than a series of meaningless rituals and empty gestures. Exemplary of Bruguera’s devotion to a socially conscious practice, this work investigates questions of authority, liberty, action, and collectivity through the combination of political subject matter and active audience engagement.

“As we expand our holdings of works rooted in performance and live action, this is an essential and important addition to the collection,” said MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry. “Tania Bruguera’s commitment to engaging the public in complex political histories through carefully considered actions and environments has produced a distinguished body of work at the intersection of the museum and the public sphere.”

Stuart Comer, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA, adds: “This is an iconic work in the artist’s career that has laid the groundwork for many of her projects over the past two decades, as she shifted the focus away from her own body to the direct physical and social experience of the audience. This powerful work draws the public into a direct encounter with political issues facing the people of Cuba and opens a space for confrontation and consideration, bridging social and aesthetic experience. Bruguera has claimed art as a platform ‘from which to have a dialogue about political ideas and even try new political structures.’ Untitled (Havana, 2000) tests out these structures and the bodies and relationships they govern.”