| Juan Pablo Ballester | |
| Birth Date: | September 16, 1966 |
| Birth Place: | Camagüey, Cuba |
Juan Pablo Ballester (born September 16, 1966, in Camagüey, Cuba) is a Cuban-born artist who works mainly with photography and video art, although he has also worked with installations and performance art. He has also developed activities as a curator, assistant curator and cultural manager.
Juan Pablo Ballester graduated in 1990 from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba, and was member of the artistic group Grupo ABTV from 1988 to 1991. In 1992 he left Cuba and went into exile in Spain. In 1995 he co-organized the event and curated the exhibition Cuba: La Isla Posible (Cuba: The Possible Island),[1] the first multidisciplinary event that brought together Cuban artists, writers and intellectuals from the island and exile to debate the future of Cuban Culture, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Barcelona, Spain. He was a recipient of Cintas Fellow 1998–99.[2] Since 2011 he lives in Miami.
In his formative years, Juan Pablo Ballester trained within the ironic tactics to dismantle the official representations of national identity that the so-called Renaissance of the visual arts used to redefine the parameters of "revolutionary" art in Havana in the late 1980s. During his student years in the Fine Arts Faculty of the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, he developed well-known projects among which are El que imita fracasa (He Who Imitates Fails), 1988 (with Ileana Villazón); "Nosotros": Exposición Antológica de la obra de Raúl Martínez ("We": An Anthological Exhibition of the Work of Raúl Martínez), 1989 (with Grupo ABTV), and Homenaje to Hans Haacke (Homage to Hans Haacke), 1989 (with Grupo ABTV), an exhibition that despite having been censored by the Cuban authorities hours before its opening, still circulates among the island's artists as a legend.[3]
In his first years in Madrid, Ballester experienced the difficult experience of emigration and the need for integration, at the same time that he came into contact with the exotic tropical that surrounds the Spanish and European vision of his birthplace. During these years Ballester began working on a series of photographs documenting an ephemeral performance event about his identity, for which he used strategies such as appropriation, collage, manipulation and the use of the artist's body as a visual symbol. In his approach to photography Ballester does not undertake a critique of modernity and its foundations of unity and originality, but rather deconstructs the social rites behind the images, he distances himself from Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" to break the opacity of the historical narratives that take photography as proof of plausibility and social product.
For Spanish critics and curators Juan Vicente Aliága and Mar Villaespesa, “Ballester's photographs taken in the 90s have been developed together with his subject (from the first one that refers to the insularity of Cuba and its social situation until its representation of the contingent subject) while at the same time exploring different crossroads, such as the condition of exile and sexual identity; crossroads between the public and the private, between the subject subject and the social self. The experiences reflected in his photographs refer to complex formulations that mix the physical, the biographical and the intimate but placing special emphasis on the sexed nature of all actions and on the consideration that even the most private aspect has a political or ideological interpretation".[4]
In 1994 he moved to Barcelona, where his experience of emigration would intensify when he was confronted with a society engaged in the search, construction and reaffirmation of an National identity encouraged from within government structures to differentiate itself from the Spanish state and the European context in which it finds itself submerged. Two large series of works are due to this time under the name Basado en hechos reales (Based on real events) and Enlloc, a Catalan language word that can be translated as Nowhere.
During his years in Barcelona, Ballester carefully examined the institutional and aesthetic means by which a monolithic Catalan nationalism is communicated. In these works, Ballester reveals the iconography of internal, external Catalans and Xarnegos as fundamental to the visual definition of national identity that is supported by a variety of photographic genres, from advertising to postcards of monuments and snapshots of tourists. Ballester also used casting models from advertising agencies dressed as Mossos d'Esquadra (local police) as a fashion report in landscape settings – idyllic and idealized – prototypical of Catalan Noucentisme painting but using techniques that are common to many neo-objectivist photographers: long shots and centered camera positions, geometric composition, occasional subjects, as well as the symbolic load of the spaces chosen to transmit multiple layers of meaning.
In these photographs Ballester addresses topics such as the (re) construction of identity, the temptation of the ethnographic, fictionalizations and historical patrimonializations, the invention of traditions, the resemantization and idealization of the common imaginary, or the exoticization and exoticism, it configures a framework of thought that clearly makes it impossible to read an image as a simple retinal effect alone. His photographic series are great fictional devices that do not demand a viewer as an author but a viewer as a producer of meaning.
“The result of this display of variety is a rhetorical stress on the role of photography in the taxonomic evaluation of a given territory and its people. Ballester is not attempting to engage the sympathies of viewers toward his band of outsiders – he addresses the question of inclusion at another level, in a far more analytic manner. His work speaks from an outsider’s point of view, but does not cry out 'see me', but rather, 'see yourselves and what you look for.” Coco Fusco[5]
NoWhere (2013), Farside Gallery, Miami, FL;Enlloc (2005), Museo Pablo Serrano. Instituto Aragones de Arte y Cultura Contemporáneo (IACC), Zaragoza, Spain;Enlloc (2004), Galería La Fábrica, PHotoEspaña 2004, Madrid, Spain;Enlloc (2004) Galería Tomás March, Valencia, Spain;Enlloc (2003) Galería Antonio de Barnola, Barcelona, Spain; En ningún lugar (2002), Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville, Spain;Basado en hechos reales (1998), Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain;¡Juntos y Adelante!. Arte, Política y Voluntad de Representación (1991), with Grupo ABTV, Collateral exhibition to the IV Bienal de La Habana, Casa del Joven Creador, Havana, Cuba;Homenaje a Hans Haacke (1989), with Grupo ABTV, Castillo de la Real Fuerza, Havana, Cuba; "Nosotros': Exposición Antológica de la Obra de Raúl Martínez (1989), with Grupo ABTV, Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, Havana, Cuba;El que imita fracasa (1988), with Ileana Villazón, Galería L, Havana, Cuba;Pinturas abstractas (1986), with Ileana Villazón, Galería de la Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA), Havana, Cuba
In dialogue (2020), Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM), Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain;Goaltending (2017), Centro Cultural Español (CCE), Miami, FL;Reverse: Rewrinting Culture (2014), Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami, FL;Medianoche en la ciudad (2011), ARTIUM. Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Centre d’Art la Panera, Lleida, Spain;Killing Time: An Exhibition of Cuban Artist from the 1980’s to the Present (2007), Exit Art, New York City, NY;Nueva tecnología, nueva iconografía, nueva fotografía. Fotografía de los años 80 y 90 en la Colección del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2004), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCAR), Madrid; Museu d’ Art Espanyol Contemporani (MAEC), Palma de Mallorca; Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, Cuenca, Spain;Fallen Heroes. Masculinity and Representation (John Coplans, Gilbert & George, Peter Land, Paul McCarthy, Mark Morrisroe, Juan Pablo Ballester, Del Lagrace Volcano) (2002), Espai d´Art Contemporani de Castelló (EACC), Castellón de la Plana, Spain;Inter/Zona. Arts Visuals i Creació Contemporània a Barcelona (2001), Virreina Palace, Barcelona, Spain;Ofelias y Ulises. En torno al arte español contemporáneo (2001), 49th Venice Biennale, Pavilion in the Old Barns of Giudecca, Venice, Italy;Transgenéric @ s. Representations and Experiences on Genres, Society and Sexuality in Contemporary Spanish Art (1998), Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastián, Spain; Cuba On. 11 Conceptual Photographers (1998), Generous Miracle Gallery, New York City, NY;Breaking Barriers. Selection from the Permanent Contemporary Cuban Collection (1997), Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL;Cuba Siglo XX. Modernidad y Sincretismo (1996), Atlantic Center of Modern Art (CAAM), Las Palmas, Canary Islands; Fundación La Caixa, Palma de Mallorca; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spain;Kuba O.K. (1990), Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany