Among Cuba’s foremost conceptual artists, Capote has cultivated a multimedia practice in which poignant, material metaphors convey the vicissitudes of human and psychic experience. Raised in the western province of Pinar del Río, he studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte under René Francisco from 1996 to 2001. Since his acclaimed collaboration with the collective DUPP at the Seventh Havana Biennial (2000), Capote has exhibited widely and represented his country in the Venice Biennale’s first Cuban pavilion (2011). His work encompasses sculpture, installation, and performance, often repurposing familiar and found materials—as in Protocolo—with political and psychological irony.
Protocolo was first exhibited at Galería Habana in 2001 as part of a larger installation that included a second (identical) chair, a long table placed between them, and a garbled, unintelligible soundtrack. A metaphor for failed political and interpersonal diplomacy, the hybrid microphone-chairs remark upon the futility of empty ceremonials and endlessly static noise. “The microphones are the works’ motifs,” Amalina Bomnin observes, “suggesting a questioning of whether it is the private that molds the public or the other way around, or whether in the final analysis contemporary society, apparently so interconnected, generates incommunication” (“Iván and Yoan Capote,” Art Nexus 44, April-June 2002, p. 109).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park