Monday April 27 – Thursday April 30, 7:30pm
Magda Fernandez
Through Immigrant Eyes
Live chat with the artist at 8:45pm
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of video works by Boston-based artist Magda Fernandez.
The program includes a selection of 13 short videos made by Fernandez between 2006 and 2020 offering a comprehensive look into her videography. In these works, often conceptual and resting on her reflections on her own identity as a Cuban-American, the artist performs in various disguises and roles against moving-image backdrops of original or found footage.
Fernandez arrived in Queens, New York from Cuba as a child. There she found herself often stigmatized and facing ethnic slurs in public. At the same time, at home she was grappling with the racist behavior of her formerly privileged, authoritarian parents. The deepening sense of displacement and lack of belonging she felt is reflected in her works such as the 2019 “mi maleta latina” featuring an old, open suitcase containing a series of photographs from the artist’s family album.
In several works such as “colonial blindness” (2011-2015), “sangre podrida” (2017) and “to my 5th great-grandmother” (2018), all stemming from discoveries the artist made about her Cuban ancestry through DNA testing and genealogical research, Fernandez gauges her position within the long-standing history of racism and persecution of her native country, as well as within her family lineage. In an interview with writer Silvi Naçi, the artist explains, “To eliminate racism, you have to look at your own family history of racism, acknowledge that you were born into that, and make sure that you’re not repeating those horrors. It means looking at your ancestral past.”
While Fernandez likes to immerse herself within green-screen worlds of her own making, in “through immigrant eyes” (2018) she reverses the paradigm by projecting the views from her uncle’s 8mm travel home movies onto a portion of her body. During her childhood in Queens, New York, those images represented the only places she could visit, via the magic of cinema.
Fernandez will be joining us via live chat for a Q&A with the online audience at 8:45pm ET, following the program.
TO WATCH:
General admission $7 (Valid through April 30, 7:30pm)
Member admission $5 (Valid through April 30, 7:30pm)
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Magda Fernandez is a Cuban-born, Boston-based artist who has been making experimental videos since 2006. Fernandez creates silent, mostly diaristic videos that question power and oppression, reality and fantasy, and memory and history. Fernandez’s videos received the Los Angeles Experimental Forum’s Best Experimental Short Award and Audience Award (2018), Venezuela’s 5 Continents International Film Festival’s Best Video Art Award (June 2018), the International New York Film Festival’s Silver Experimental Award (2018), the London Independent Film Awards’ Best Experimental (October 2017), and additional Honorable Mentions in the LA Underground Film Forum (2018) and the Experimental Forum (2018). Fernandez’s videos also were a Semi-Finalist in FilmArte Madrid (2019), and Official Selections in the London Experimental Film Festival (2020), Chile’s Santiago Independent Film Awards (August 2019), the Dumbo Film Festival (March 2019), the Queens World Film Festival (2019), the South Film and Arts Academy Festival in Chile (2018), and the Sydney World Film Festival (2017). Her videos have been exhibited at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, in “Nine Moments for Now” at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University, in “STAND UP” at Kayafas Gallery, in “latinx@americanaza” at Samson Gallery, and in “La Cubana y El Cubano” at the Copley Society. In 2010, Fernandez was invited to present her videos-in-progress at Ute Meta Bauer and Joan Jonas’ Art, Culture, and Technology Lectures Series: “The Theatrical/The Performative/The Transformative” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For her past artwork, Fernandez has received grants from the Council for the Arts at MIT, and was a finalist for both the Cintas Foundation Fellowship and Creative Capital Visual Arts Grant.
Program:
it was never theirs to lose
By Magda Fernandez, HD video, silent, 2008-2014, 8 minutes 35 seconds
In this early video, Fernandez enacts her family’s responses to the Cuban Revolution in search of clues that might explain their intolerance to her opposing views.
mi maleta latina
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2019, 6 minutes 29 seconds
”La maleta latina” [the Latina suitcase] is a familiar trope used by Latinx people who’ve had to leave their homes because of political upheavals. In the American context, it also can refer to the “baggage” that comes along with that profound life event. Using salvaged family photos, this video traces the displacement that Fernandez’s family experienced from Cuba to Colombia to the United States, showing the resulting shifts in class, culture, and degrees of adaptation.
stick to your own kind, stupid girl
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, 2019, 3 minutes 24 seconds
Raised and later shunned by her authoritarian mother, Fernandez re-enacts the moment in her teenagehood when she realized that she needed to break free to love who she wanted and be who she was. This is Fernandez’s most recent addition to her ongoing series about her conservative Cuban roots.
through immigrant eyes
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2018, 5 minutes 59 seconds
Fernandez projects her aunt and uncle’s 8mm roadtrip movies through the United States onto her nude torso. According to Fernandez, these movies formed her earliest impressions of the U.S. as a vast and intimidating place, during a time when she and her family were too poor to travel as Cuban refugees in Queens, NY.
a safe bed
By Magda Fernandez, digital video, sound, 2006, 4 minutes 55 seconds
In the collaborative project, “a safe bed is a human right,” Clay Ward and Magda Fernandez protest against the violent assault of a homeless man, who was set on fire while he slept in a Boston park in 2006. This is Fernandez’s earliest video, and one of the very few in which she uses sound.
colonial blindness
By Magda Fernandez, HD video, silent, 2011-2015, 4 minutes 43 seconds
In this allegorical video, Queen Isabella I of Spain claims Cuba for herself and presents the colonial social contract to Fernandez’s mother, who agrees to the problematic quid pro quo. The victims of this agreement, Cuba’s Taíno Amerindians and transplanted African slaves, respectively represented by Taíno zemis and a Santerian Madama spirit doll, in turn haunt future generations with the weight of this terrible legacy.
to my 5th great-grandmother
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2018, 7 minutes 38 seconds
Fernandez performs a symbolic exhumation and loving reburial of her West African 5th great-grandmother, a Cuban slave whom she learned about from a DNA test and Cuban slave census.
to my slave-owning, slave-trading cuban ancestors. to the 300-year lot of you
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2018, 48 seconds
In this brief performance, Fernandez sends a radical message to the spirits of her Cuban colonial ancestors for exploiting Taíno Amerindians and transplanted African slaves over generations.
desert
By Magda Fernandez, HD video, silent, 2007-2010, 6 minutes 18 seconds
A meditation on the wonders of a virtual landscape. Performing as a magickal crone, Fernandez conjures and becomes one with a virtual desert in this paean to video compositing.
sangre podrida
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2017, 3 minutes 17 seconds
Fernandez turns the whip on a slave-owning colonial ancestor, using footage that she shot in a former Cuban sugar plantation and a colonial house on the island.
querida cuba
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2017, 5 minutes 48 seconds
A video performance that asks if documents, DNA, memories, ancestral history, love of people and place are enough to qualify one as a cubana after a lifetime of displacement.
el futuro
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2016, 1 minute 27 seconds
In this loop video, a Cuban boy awaits his time for racial justice under the gaze of Cuba’s white revolutionary heroes, Camilo Cienfuegos, Jose Martí, and Che Guevara.
Untitled
By Magda Fernandez, 4k video, silent, 2020, 3 minutes 26 seconds
Images of cities and melting glaciers collide over a rising metallic-red sea in this nightmarish vision of a future under global warming.
TRT: Approx. 63 minutes
Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).