Artist Talk and Book Launch: A conversation between Arien Chang and Mailyn Machado marking the launch of Chang's first photobook, Prepositions
Join us at the gallery for a conversation on Cuban photography with photographer Arien Chang and essayist Mailyn Machado, marking the launch of Chang’s first photobook, Prepositions: A Cuban Photographic Journey.
The book is a visual narrative of a day in Cuba, from dawn to dusk. It features a selection of black-and-white series taken by Chang over the span of a decade and an essay written by Machado. Between 2003 and 2015, Chang documented the daily lives of Cubans, mainly in Havana, but also in some of the island’s most remote regions. Through the journey proposed by the book, we encounter a Cuba that, as Roland Barthes wrote about the essence of photography, “has been”: a Cuba that, at the moment these pictures were taken, existed as their imprint shows, but no longer does.
This dialogue will explore Chang’s photobook, the impact of his experience as an emigrant in New York on both this project and his current work, and the contrast between the Cuba that was and the Cuba that is today.
Arien Chang is a self-taught photographer whose imagery intimately portrays daily life in Cuba across both urban and rural settings. Chang's photography shows his fascination and need to record the complexities of his surroundings. He has traveled throughout his country in search of individuals and characters related to the cultural landscape he wishes to document.
Chang's work can be placed among a generation of Cuban photographers working within a strong documentary tradition, yet his early influences came from studying the work of photographers belonging to the Magnum Photos Agency. His own practice shifts the focus toward individual stories, underworld, and personal expressions that define Cuba’s social and cultural fabric. He explores areas in Cuban society that are generally ignored in Cuban documentary photography. Themes like the rodeo, gay culture and bodybuilding are reflected in his work. His work is held in collections across Spain, Bolivia, Germany, Denmark, Mexico, Brazil, China and the United States. He lives and works in New York City.
Mailyn Machado received her BA in Art History from the University of Havana, and her MA in Art Criticism from the University of Girona, Spain, in 2006, which led to her work as a curator and critic of contemporary art and audiovisual media. She is the author of Fuera de revoluciones (2016), and the trilogy Open Studio (2018), completed with the exhibit El circuito del arte cubano (El Apartamento, 2019). She was a professor of Art Theory at the University of Havana (2001-2008). In 2009, she received the Guy Pérez Cisneros Art Critics Award, and the National Curatorial Award for the exhibition Tanda corrida. She has curated exhibitions for the Cuban National Museum of Fine Arts, the Havana Biennial, the Cultural Centers of Spain in the Americas, and the Jewish Museum in New York as part of the project Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video (2013-2016).
