COCO FUSCO APRIL 7TH 6PM
Two Works by Coco Fusco
[ The Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui Odyssey + a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert ]
April 7th, 6pm, Lamar Dodd School of Art, Room S150, 270 River Road, Athens, GA 30602
Fusco and Gómez-Peña, The Year of the White Bear, 1992. Photo: Glenn Halvorsen
SineWaves in collaboration with the Lamar Dodd School of Art and The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute are excited to present two critically acclaimed videos by Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco. For over 20 years, Fusco has examined issues of cultural otherness, stereotyping, and racial politics through modes of performance and video. Perhaps her most seminal work, The Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui Odyssey (1993), documents a year-long traveling performance by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who perform as caged Amerindians from an imaginary island. Their satirical performance harkens back to the anthropological tradition of human beings being exhibited in zoos and museums, yet remains relevant to intercultural relations today. In a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert(2004), Fusco combines fictional and documentary source materials to reflect on the famous 1970 trial: The State of California vs. Angela Davis. UCLA Professor and Black Panther Party affiliate Angela Davis was wrongfully accused of conspiring in the armed take over of a California courtroom. Davis went underground and was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted List. In the months leading up to her arrest, law enforcement officials misidentified hundreds of African-American women as Davis. Davis’s case raised global conversations around racial profiling and government targeting of black intellectuals in the United States.
Coco Fusco was born in New York in 1960. Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and holds her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Art & Visual Culture from Middlesex University. She is winner of the prestigious 2003 Herb Alpert Award and is currently The Martin Luther King visiting scholar at the M.I.T..
a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert ©Coco Fusco, Courtesy of Video Data Bank
Screening Program:
The Couple in the Cage: Guatianaui Odyssey
a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert
TRT: 62 min.
“A deliciously witty satire about cultural stereotyping” – Caryn James, The New York Times
“In an impressively manipulative, expressively eclectic critique of the museum spectacle, Gómez-Peña & Fusco addressed the instability of the identities conferred upon them as Hispanic Americans.” –Charles Green, ArtForum
“The success of these works resides in their marriage of artistic and historical references, as well as their examination of the relationship between oppression and technology, voyeurism, and surveillance.” –D.C. Murray, Art in America
The Couple in the Cage ©Coco Fusco, Courtesy of Video Data Bank