Artist Coco Fusco joins us for a screening of her Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021) and selections from The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey (1992), followed by a discussion of her recent work.
The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey documents Fusco’s 1992 performance with Guillermo Gómez-Peña in which the two artists toured the United States, Spain, England, and Australia as representatives of the fictional, “undiscovered” island of Guatinau. Displayed inside a gilded cage, the duo performed “traditional tasks” such as lifting weights and watching television. Although the performance was intended as a satirical reenactment of ethnographic exhibitions of humans—a practice that reached its peak during the world’s fairs of the 19th century—many viewers believed Fusco and Gómez-Peña were from a real place unclaimed by a Western country. Viewer responses, documented in the film, ranged from fear and concern to debates over authenticity and calls to the Humane Society. Fusco later reproduced some of the responses captured in the film as engravings, referencing the early forms of mass media that popularized images of exoticized “others.” These engravings, along with the film, are on view on the Museum’s second floor in Gallery 208: 500 Years.
Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021) is a video essay, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and the Museum of Modern Art of Medellin, that was featured at the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist, moderated by Beverly Adams, the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, and Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American Art and director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute.
The Couple in the Cage: Guatinaui Odyssey. 1993. Directed by Coco Fusco, Paula Heredia. Standard-definition video (black and white and color, sound), 31 min.
Short selected interviews with artists Yuki Kihara and Seba Calfuqueo.
Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word. 2021. Directed by Coco Fusco. HD video (color), 12 min.