‘Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island‘ is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique.
Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, 2021. Video still. Courtesy the artist.
The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.
With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.
Along with the exhibition, KW Institute for Contemporary Art further honors the complexity and multidisciplinarity of Fusco’s writing, activism, and performative work with a varied public program. In addition to a series of talks, partly organized together with ICI Berlin, KW commissioned Fusco to create the new multimedia-performance Antigone Is Not Available Right Now, which is staged in collaboration with Sophiensæle early December 2023.
Parallel to the exhibition at KW, an extensive, eponymous monograph of Fusco’s work is published by Thames & Hudson with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anna Gritz, Jill Lane, Antonio José Ponte, and the artist herself.
Co-Curators: Anna Gritz and Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant curator: Linda Franken
The exhibition will be on view from the 14th of September, 2023, until the 7th of January, 2024. For more information, please visit KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
