Tania Bruguera's Largest Italian Exhibition Opens at PAC Milan

Tania Bruguera, the Cuban artist-activist who coined 'Arte de conducta' in 1999, now has her most extensive Italian exhibition at PAC in Milan, curated by Diego Sileo. The show, titled 'La verità anche a scapito del mondo' (Truth even at the expense of the world), references Hannah Arendt's phrase. Bruguera, named among Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers and a contributor to the UN Human Rights Council's first document on artistic freedom, left Cuba in exchange for the release of 27 political prisoners. She now lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard. The exhibition spans three levels of PAC, featuring works that address migration, power, totalitarianism, capitalism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and unjust imprisonments of Cuban prisoners. A central piece is a large European flag with the stitched phrase 'The poor treatment of migrants today will be our dishonor tomorrow,' sewn by volunteers from the National Association of Former Deportees to Nazi camps, including three survivors of Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Bruguera stated, 'I have a terror of lost memory, because it is easy to be unjust and cruel if one forgets what injustice and cruelty are.' The exhibition also includes her performance '100 Hours of Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism' from 2015-21, featuring a rocking chair. Bruguera founded the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (Instar) in Havana in 2015 to promote civic literacy on human rights.