15th Bienal de la Habana – Shared Horizons
15 November 2024 – 28 February 2025

Since its creation in 1983, the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center has among its cardinal tasks the realization of the Havana Biennial. Our event has been defined as a space for confrontation and reflection of singular importance in the international art scene, with the essential purpose of contributing to the research, dissemination and recognition of the visual arts of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. The Biennial has favored the establishment of a horizontal scenario for the communication of artists from these geographical areas and others coming from countries with more developed economies.

The Havana Biennial, from the maturity of its four decades, faithful to its founding assumptions and its decolonizing will, continues to reformulate its discursive assumptions and broaden its outlook. In 2024, the Biennial will reach its 40th anniversary, which we will celebrate with its 15th edition. We intend to analyze its trajectory, revisit and rethink some of the themes that have characterized it, and create new networks of communication and collaboration.

Shared Horizons

Beyond all differences, there is a space of knowledge, expectations and affections that most human beings share. Seeking those points of connection, those common areas that allow us to move forward together toward a more equitable and sustainable future should be our main motto. Close to celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Havana Biennial continues to share those horizons where utopia dwells and convenes its fifteenth edition guided by the idea of weaving new communication and collaboration networks that will allow us to continue growing, deepening and broadening our range of influences, in pursuit of peace and a better coexistence between humankind and nature.

Imbued with the spirit of the celebration and facing the possibility of reunions, we propose to make an analysis of the event’s trajectory, to retake and rethink some of the themes that have been transversal to its history and that have evolved over time showing new nuances. What could be then that characterizing element of the Havana Biennial? It is Cuba, its people committed day by day to preserve values of solidarity and dignity, with the creativity of both artists and non-artists. It is the awareness that only by working together it is possible to realize the dreamed work and, above all, the full confidence that it will be a collective and solidary work. It is our goal in this edition to highlight this network of relationships that make the development of the event possible.

We envision this Biennial as an affective network that bets on a coexistence based on respect for differences and the value of other knowledge and forms of existence (and resistance) far from the dominant model. We are interested in creators and projects that work collaboratively, beyond the limits of their respective disciplines, and that are capable of developing actions that mediate between all strata and facets of society and culture. We will seek to strengthen collective work to achieve a common good.

As has happened on other occasions, but now even more emphatically, we want the main stage of
this biennial to be neither the galleries nor the spaces traditionally dedicated to art. It is our intention that the artists not only live the experience of Cuba, but that they create together with its inhabitants in the communities and that they are able to develop meditation strategies that allow a greater rapprochement among all.

We invite you to walk together, to share the horizon, the joys and sorrows of the road in search of a utopia that, although it seems unattainable, drives us to be better and less selfish every day.