La expresión psicógena

An artist as well as the cofounder, with her partner Ezequiel Suárez, of Espacio Aglutinador, a pioneering alternative space in Havana established in 1994, Ceballos has long supported arts and (feminist) activism in Cuba. She received a Cintas Foundation award in 2022 and has held residencies in New York and Basel. As the recipient of the First Prize at the Primer Salón de Pintura Contemporánea Cubana in 1995, she was granted an exhibition at Havana’s Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales the following year; she chose to show the present work as part of a series of mixed-media objects titled La expresión psicógena.

“My current project, which began in 1995, is about illness and the human condition, the dark parts of the human experience,” Ceballos explained at the time. “I call it the psychogenic expression.” Conceived as a long-term exhibition project, the series was mostly “based on autobiographical narratives; that is, my own story, my family’s story, and my relationship with art,” she continued. “Much of it is about human conflict, the existential drama as both a personal and a universal theme” (“Sandra Ceballos,” 1990s Art from Cuba: A National Residency and Exhibition Program, exh. cat., Art in General, New York, 1997, p. 35). The hospital provided the setting and matière for the series, in this case coils of surgical tubing and lengths of cloth that form a strangely scarred and disquieting assemblage. The green monochrome is variously stitched, stained, and stapled, its sutures a metaphor for the body in physical and psychological pain.

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park