This is Not America

Boris Mitic / In Praise of Nothing

Faena Festival: This Is Not America, an exploration on the multiplicity of cultures across the continent debuting during Miami Art Week from December 3-9, 2018.

A new experimental platform, the first-ever Faena Festival is an exploration of America as a concept, a myth and a narrative that at times has divided us, but ultimately has the power to unify across physical, political and conceptual borders.

Agustina Woodgate

Faena Festival: This Is Not America features commissions, installations, videos and performances by Derrick Adams, Miya Ando, Cecilia Bengolea, Joseph Beuys, Ana Teresa Fernández, Alfredo Jaar, Eugene Jarecki, Isabel Lewis, Boris Mitic, Luna Paiva, George Sánchez-Calderón, Tavares Strachan, Wu Tsang and boychild, Agustina Woodgate and Rev. Houston R. Cypress.

Ana Teresa Fernández

Alfredo Jaar

Faena Festival: This is Not America is keyed to Miami’s enduring role as a port that welcomes migrants, refugees, and tourists from across the US and the Americas, and from countries throughout the world.

The festival engages with the multiplicity of communities and cultures and the palimpsest of histories that have created the Americas while responding specifically to Miami as its hemispheric hub.

All programming is free and open to the public.

Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud / DFS

Derrick Adams

This is Not America proposes a new curatorial format for presentation that occupies and engages the entire Faena District and extends beyond into public spaces of the city of Miami Beach as an experiential platform. The diverse venues of the Faena District Miami Beach will be activated, including the public areas of the street, sidewalk and beach; the Faena Hotel, including its theater and screening room; and Faena Forum – the OMA-designed cultural centerpiece of Faena District Miami Beach.

Isabel Lewis

Wu Tsang

Joseph Beuys

“It has always been my dream to have our international cultural festival – a polyphonic platform to amplify voices, bringing together practitioners from different artistic fields. Artists are not limited by geopolitical divides, so in this inaugural edition we’ve decided to explore diverse interpretations of the Americas, what unifies and ultimately connects us. Each future edition will have a unique theme, organized under a different concept that I personally find relevant and will develop working in collaboration with the worlds most recognized and emerging talents, artists , thinkers and curators,” stated Alan Faena.

Miya Ando

Tavares Strachan

The 2018 Faena Festival takes Alfredo Jaar’s prescient 1987 work A Logo for America, as a point of departure for the exploration of America as a place, concept and myth. The piece will be presented on an LED jumbotron mounted on a boat navigating the Miami Beach shoreline. The monumental, text-and-image-based animated work, originally commissioned by The Public Art Fund for the giant electronic billboard marking the heart of New York’s Times Square, features the text “This is Not America” emblazoned across an outline map of the U.S. that morphs into an outline of the entire western hemisphere from a variety of perspectives, including from South to North, challenging the traditional view of the North at the top of the map. For the Faena presentation, the boat (which generally interrupts lazy beach days with advertisements for bars and clubs) will travel the entire coastline of Miami Beach each day throughout the Festival so that the public work may be experienced by the entire city.

“This is Not America addresses America as concept more than a place, a contested and powerful idea that is greater than the waters and borders that frame it,” noted Zoe Lukov, curator of Faena Art. “Artists in the Festival have been invited to explore the concept of America as a myth and a narrative that has at times bound and divided us but ultimately has the power to unify. By occupying the interstitial zone between land and sea many of these site-specific installations seek to reimagine porous and transitional spaces as places of refuge and safe harbor that are representative of what our ‘America’ is and can become.”

Works in the festival reflect the continuities and changes across the Americas – from South to North – based on shared histories and the interchange of contemporary cultures.

[via Faena Festival]

This is Not America
December 3-9, 2018 / Faena Festival, Miami
Please visit the exhibition page >