Coco Fusco
Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
14 Sep 2023 - 07 Jan 2024
Coco Fusco, To Live in June with Your Tongue Hanging Out, 2018. Courtesy the artist (left); Coco Fusco, The Eternal Night, 2023. Courtesy the artist (right). Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artist.
Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artist.
Coco Fusco, The Confession, 2015. Courtesy the artist (left). Coco Fusco, The Message in a Bottle from María Elena, 2015. Courtesy die Künstlerin (right). Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
Archive material of: Coco Fusco, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, 1992–94. Courtesy the artist (back); Coco Fusco with Paula Heredia, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 1993 (front). Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
Coco Fusco, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, 1992–94. Courtesy die Künstlerin (back left); Coco Fusco with Paula Heredia, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 1993 (front left); Coco Fusco, The Undiscovered Amerindians, 2012. Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
Coco Fusco with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Mexarcane International, 1994–95. Courtesy the artist (back left). Coco Fusco with Nao Bustamante, Stuff, 1996–99. Courtesy the artist (right). Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
Coco Fusco with Nao Bustamante, Stuff, 1996–99. Courtesy the artist (right). Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling. Courtesy the artist.
Coco Fusco, TED Ethology: Primate Visions of the Human Mind, 2015. Courtesy the artist (right); Coco Fusco, Bare Life Study #1, 2005. Courtesy Videobrasil Historical Collection (left); Coco Fusco with Dan Turner, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, 2006/08. Courtesy the artist (back); Installation view of the exhibition Coco Fusco – Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2023; Photo: Frank Sperling.
Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.
With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.
Along with the exhibition, KW Institute for Contemporary Art further honors the complexity and multidisciplinarity of Fusco’s writing, activism, and performative work with a varied public program. In addition to a series of talks, partly organized together with ICI Berlin, KW commissioned Fusco to create the new multimedia-performance Antigone Is Not Available Right Now, which is staged in collaboration with Sophiensæle early December 2023.
Parallel to the exhibition at KW, an extensive, eponymous monograph of Fusco’s work is published by Thames & Hudson with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anna Gritz, Jill Lane, Antonio José Ponte, and the artist herself.
Co-Curators: Anna Gritz and Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant curator: Linda Franken
With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.
Along with the exhibition, KW Institute for Contemporary Art further honors the complexity and multidisciplinarity of Fusco’s writing, activism, and performative work with a varied public program. In addition to a series of talks, partly organized together with ICI Berlin, KW commissioned Fusco to create the new multimedia-performance Antigone Is Not Available Right Now, which is staged in collaboration with Sophiensæle early December 2023.
Parallel to the exhibition at KW, an extensive, eponymous monograph of Fusco’s work is published by Thames & Hudson with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anna Gritz, Jill Lane, Antonio José Ponte, and the artist herself.
Co-Curators: Anna Gritz and Léon Kruijswijk
Assistant curator: Linda Franken