Dissonance

Dissonance (2015), is a two-channel video for which 2 monitors are placed near the floor, thus requiring viewers to kneel down. In doing so, their position replicates that of political prisoners, such as the ones seen in an execution image from the Spanish American War hung in the gallery. One video contains audio from Assata Shakur, a member of the former Black Liberation Army and now a U.S. refugee living in Cuba, reading an open letter to the Pope that details how she was targeted and wrongly imprisoned by the U.S. government. The second video features a recording of a phone call by Cuban-born performance artist Tania Bruguera to her sister after she was arrested for an attempt to place a microphone in Havana’s Revolution Square for Cubans to speak their minds in public. Shakur’s audio is English with Spanish subtitles, Bruguera’s the opposite. Both women are presented defending themselves to individuals outside their own governments, choosing whomever seemed like the most accessible listener for their expressions of injustice: a family member or a religious leader. Kneeling down and hearing the women defend themselves, the viewer is implicated both physically and emotionally.