The art exhibition, the largest collection of Cuban artists ever shown in
the United Kingdom, will show the work of 26 renowned Cuban artists and of
20 other international ones who have donated work to draw attention to the
case of Guerrero, Hernandez, Fernando Gonzalez, Ramon Labañino, and Rene
Gonzalez —internationally known as the Cuban Five—, who were arrested in
the U.S. and given harsh and unjust sentences for monitoring anti-Cuba
right-wing groups in South Florida that were planning and carrying out
terrorist actions against Cuba.

“The art itself is very surprising,” said Dodie Weppler, an expert on
Cuban art who is coordinating the exhibition, which is sponsored by the
Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the UK. “There’s no socialist realism, it’s
all things you might not expect. Culture has always been a vital element
in Cuba’s radical tradition, but the Revolution made possible a cultural
experiment on a scale never before seen in the Americas,” she added.

The list of artists whose works will be exhibited include Alexis Leyva
(“Kcho”), Manuel Mendive, Eduardo Roca Salazar (“Choco”), Jose Fuster, and
Juan Roberto Diago.

Other artists, mainly UK-based, who have donated their work in support of
the show include John Keane, Mona Hatoum, Alasdair Gray, Derek Boshier,
John Byrne, David Harding, the kennardphillipps collective, and The
Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell.

“We called the exhibition ‘Beyond the Frame’ because it ruptured the
traditional role of the frame as a boundary and acknowledged the Five have
been ‘framed’ by the U.S. government,” Weppler pointed out.

“I didn’t know a great deal about the Five before,” said Keane, official
war artist of the 1991 Gulf war. “But I believe in using art to help the
course of justice. If art can provide some sort of conscience, it’s
preferable to merely being a currency for the super-rich,” he noted.

For his part, Boshier, a British artist now based in Los Angeles, said
that he had made his first artwork connected to the island, entitled
‘Situation in Cuba’, back in 1961: “It was a reaction to the Bay of Pigs
(the failed U.S.-backed mercenary invasion).” His contribution to the
current exhibition is a 2011 reconstruction of that work.

After London, the exhibition will move to Glasgow, where it will be on
display at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Design and Architecture,
on May 7-13.
 

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