The Cuban Artists Fund in collaboration with chashama is pleased to offer the exhibition, Body Memories, a photography exhibit featuring the work of Cuban artists, Cirenaica Moreira and Adonis Flores.

Cirenaica Moreira and Adonis Flores, two young members of the current Cuban visual arts community, are part of this international trend of creative thinking that revisits canons of action and ideology. In his work, Adonis Flores regards war as a cornerstone of creation, especially in the existential vicissitudes of human beings. Cirenaica Moreira questions the alleged banality of the feminine universe and criticizes the cultural yokes historically imposed on women, which dictate their confinement in the bosom of their families. Both artists use their work to address national politics and history, gender and sexuality, nature, culture and society. In doing so, both artists reflect on the social construction of both genders, the roles historically assigned to them, and the differentiated place they occupy within the separate spheres of what is public and what is private, with the usual, almost exclusive, participation of men in the first one and the relegation of women to the second.

When these two artists action their camera’s shutter, they provocatively question the classical myth of men going to war for the honor and glory it brings them and their people, while their wives wait in the still, absolute calm of their homes. Turning the critical focus of their lenses to these matters, as others refute the need to make war or dispute the sterility of women’s domestic space, turns art into a platform for transformation. Works of art then become invitations for creative expression or critical dialogue that, under the delightful guise of visual or aesthetic considerations, target notions that are cultural, psychological, sociological and anthropological in nature. It is at this precise juncture that their value and use in present times can be found.