Dashel Hernandez
Dashel Hernandez (Cuba)
Dash is a visual artist, art educator, and writer. His work examines autobiographical and childhood memory and their interconnections with social and cultural memory, material culture, and history in 1980s Cuba.
Dash works with family photographs, archival materials, objects, and memorabilia, producing videos, paintings, and installations that explore the role of personal and collective memories in the construction of individual and social identities in his generation. Dash believes that the artistic expression of personal, intimate memories can stimulate necessary processes of recollection, examination, and healing of collective memories.
Dash holds an Executive Master in Public Administration from Syracuse University and a Bachelor of Arts in Social and Cultural Studies from the University of Camaguey in Cuba.
The Little Grey Wolf Will Come
The Little Grey Wolf Will Come is a solo exhibition by Dashel Hernandez. Dash grew up in Cuba during the late seventies and early eighties and, without knowing it, was caught up in the Cuban-Soviet ideological struggle of the Cold War. The exhibition is based on mixed concepts of material culture and cultural memory As pointed out by the artist, I am interested in creating a visual, emotional response to both, my changing personal memories, and part of my country's history.
From the early Seventies' the presence of the Soviet Union in the island was evident not only in the installation of the bureaucratic and ideological depuration mechanisms; also, the relation with the Soviet Union strengthened through academic and cultural exchanges. Many Russian products invade the Cuban market, from Russian cartoons, toys, clothes and food cans, to the establishment of Russian as a second language in primary schools.
The curatorial idea of the exhibition is to create a special space for remembrance. A memorial that comes together as the construction of a "site of memory". The manipulated photography, the objects, the sounds, the unintentionally overheard phone conversation, are traces of a country's past that have been rebuilt in a child's mind.
As a boy at school he played out his fantasies of the space race. At night, he dreamt of the snow his mother would bring back, in a tiny box, on her return from Moscow. This boy (Dash/Javier Antonio) found a special friend in the middle of a world that was falling apart.
One Day in the Life of Javier Antonio
The video, which forms part of the exhibition, gives us a glimpse into the boy's (Dash/Javier Antonio) childhood through a long phone conversation his grandmother is having with a friend. She recalls a family secret while the boy, still in bed, overhears.
