Levi Orta. Adiós España

November 16th, 2023 - February 3rd, 2024

EL APARTAMENTO

Calle de la Puebla, 4, local bajo derecha. Madrid. Spain

Adiós España / Goodbye Spain is the title of Levi Orta's exhibition that can be seen in the Main Room of the prestigious Cuban gallery, which opened in Madrid last June.

In his first solo exhibition in Madrid, the artist invites the viewer to delve into his own family history, to use it as a filter through which to decant certain ingenuities and to confront, with it, social problems of great urgency.

The exhibition consists of three installations. The first, which gives its name to the exhibition, is a farewell to the artist who, after 15 years living in Spain, returns to Havana. It is a disturbing, cinematographic, playful, almost childish piece, but with multiple conceptual layers that review the social constructions of masculinity and also the passive violence that cultural policy exercises on creators. The artist will show replicas of weapons that belonged to dictators and film characters: the Walter PPK, used by Adolf Hitler and James Bond; or the Beretta f92, handled by Augusto Pinochet and Mel Gibson in the film Lethal Weapon. The installation includes, among others, a video in which a high-ranking officer of the Cuban Armed Forces is shown cleaning his weapon.

La maldición de la casa de la esquina oeste is the action-installation that uses the recent sale of his family's house in Havana, motivated by the crisis, as material for analysis. The artist transforms the stay in the aforementioned house into a metaphor for the Revolution of which they tried to be a part. During the years they lived there, they found about 1.000.000 pesos signed by Che Guevara as president of the Banco Nacional de Cuba, which at that time had no value. A series of 10 collages tell the story of his family, his connection to the leaders of the revolution, Orta's training as a political artist and the discovery of the worthless money.

The latest installation is National Record, the artist's response to the recent policies of censorship and control applied by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Cuba; policies that curtail the freedom of artistic and intellectual creation. For this reason, Orta decided to renounce the artist's credentials granted by the government, as well as his endorsements and privileges, to dedicate himself entirely and indefinitely to the mental sport of solving the Rubik's cube in the shortest possible time, a sport in which he currently holds eight national records. As Orta points out: "In a totalitarian state, moving shapes and colours can be a political statement".

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