Hamlet Lavastida

Hamlet Lavastida is a multidisciplinary Cuban artist, based in Berlin. Central to his artistic practice is the re-appropriation of texts, images and symbols, as well as political speeches and ideological terminologies. His work reconstructs Cuban political and military propaganda as an exercise to understand the relevance of memory and historic falsifications to today’s political narratives. He revisits the role of political rhetoric and Cuban iconography in public culture, focusing particularly on how Cuban propaganda influences and distorts history. Lavastida explores the visual representation of state ideology through a variety of mediums such as video, collage, performance, public intervention, and installation.

His work has been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions, including the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Albertinum (Dresden, 2023), Documenta 15 (Kassel, 2022), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2022), Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (New York, 2022), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2021), Artium Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2015), and Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdaosk, 2013). Since 2021, he has been represented by Galerie Crone (Berlin), where he presented the exhibition Two Two, Three Nine in 2022. His works are part of several private collections.

Lavastida studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro and at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana. In 2022, he received the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award (London) in the arts category, as well as the Idealist of Contemporary Art Award for his manifesto project Penitentiary Republic. An influential and committed artist, he was one of the initiators of the 27-N democratic movement, which sparked the largest mass demonstrations in Cuban cultural history in 2020. [Source: VOX, 2024]