Artists: Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo in conversation with Bettina Spoerr
08/14/24 • 58 min
The black dome of the Secession attracted everyone's attention in June 2024. The work, entitled Statement, was a highly visible symbol of the dignity of black women. It was part of the exhibition Achievement by Cuban artist Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, whose work articulates feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial counter-visions, highlighting the achievements of black women and advocating a form of healing. In this conversation with Bettina Spoerr, recorded on 21 June 2024, the artist talks about how she fell in love with the golden dome of the Secession and was inspired to activate the architecture.
Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo
The reinvention of memory and the critical engagement with archives are central to Delahante Matienzo’s research and a strategy that lets her recover the identities and legacies of people who were denied the right to record their own histories. As a Cuban-born artist with African and Chinese roots, she knows from her own family’s experience that, for the longest time, oral traditions were the only available sources on which to draw for one’s lineage and heritage. In Achievement, she presents a fictional and speculative archive that features Black women as prominent, affluent, and esteemed members of society and as hardworking and self-determined businesswomen. In so doing, she not only undertakes a critique of history, she also takes a vital step toward a more nuanced consideration—ultimately, a reprogramming—of beliefs that have seemed impossible to dislodge. Defying the colonial gaze, the artist charts assertive alternative representations.
Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, born 1984 in Havana, Cuba, has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 2021. She describes her work across photography, video, and performance as a preoccupation with creating “symbolic solutions and personal responses” to the history of violence against women. She sees her body as an archive of the forced displacement of people from Africa and Asia to Cuba. Her critical works take a personal perspective as a starting point. Resistance, struggle, family archive, mothers, Black women, Negritude - these are the themes along which the artist’s profound work unfolds.
Collaborating in close dialogue with artists to conceive and realise exhibitions together, and reflecting on the impact contemporary art can have on our society are key to Bettina Spörr’s practice as a curator and writer. Recent collaborations include Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo and her spectacular intervention on the Secession’s golden dome (2024), or the Secession exhibition of Delaine Le Bas (2023) for which the artist has been nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize.
Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
Programmed by the board of the Secession
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Editor: Paul Macheck
Production: Bettina Spörr
The black dome of the Secession attracted everyone's attention in June 2024. The work, entitled Statement, was a highly visible symbol of the dignity of black women. It was part of the exhibition Achievement by Cuban artist Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, whose work articulates feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial counter-visions, highlighting the achievements of black women and advocating a form of healing. In this conversation with Bettina Spoerr, recorded on 21 June 2024, the artist talks about how she fell in love with the golden dome of the Secession and was inspired to activate the architecture.
Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo
The reinvention of memory and the critical engagement with archives are central to Delahante Matienzo’s research and a strategy that lets her recover the identities and legacies of people who were denied the right to record their own histories. As a Cuban-born artist with African and Chinese roots, she knows from her own family’s experience that, for the longest time, oral traditions were the only available sources on which to draw for one’s lineage and heritage. In Achievement, she presents a fictional and speculative archive that features Black women as prominent, affluent, and esteemed members of society and as hardworking and self-determined businesswomen. In so doing, she not only undertakes a critique of history, she also takes a vital step toward a more nuanced consideration—ultimately, a reprogramming—of beliefs that have seemed impossible to dislodge. Defying the colonial gaze, the artist charts assertive alternative representations.
Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, born 1984 in Havana, Cuba, has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 2021. She describes her work across photography, video, and performance as a preoccupation with creating “symbolic solutions and personal responses” to the history of violence against women. She sees her body as an archive of the forced displacement of people from Africa and Asia to Cuba. Her critical works take a personal perspective as a starting point. Resistance, struggle, family archive, mothers, Black women, Negritude - these are the themes along which the artist’s profound work unfolds.
Collaborating in close dialogue with artists to conceive and realise exhibitions together, and reflecting on the impact contemporary art can have on our society are key to Bettina Spörr’s practice as a curator and writer. Recent collaborations include Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo and her spectacular intervention on the Secession’s golden dome (2024), or the Secession exhibition of Delaine Le Bas (2023) for which the artist has been nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize.
Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
Programmed by the board of the Secession
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Editor: Paul Macheck
Production: Bettina Spörr
Previous Episode
Artists: Zhou Siwei in conversation with Damian Lentini
Zhou Siwei translates the contradictions of living and working in contemporary China into playful, personally fragmented and nonlinear works on canvas and painted objects.
This podcast was recorded on 19 June 2024 in the context of the exhibition:
Probing the ambivalence of digital technologies, the unceasing global traffic in goods, and the sleeplessness of the late-capitalist era, Zhou interweaves diverse visual and cultural influences in ways that make everyday items and signs feel at once familiar and alien, accommodating a wide range of interpretations. More
Zhou Siwei is an artist whose work focuses on the interrelation between people’s understanding of culture and the effects of culture on people. Zhou completed a BA in Oil Painting from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2005 and currently lives and works in Shanghai.
Damian Lentini is a curator at the Vienna Secession. He obtained his doctoral degree in 2009 at the University of Melbourne and has realised major projects with artists such as El Anatsui, Phyllida Barlow, Kapwani Kiwanga, Sarah Sze, Sung Tieu, Raqs Media Collective, Harun Farocki, Dumb Type, Khvay Samnang, Lina Lapelytė and the Karrabing Film Collective amongst others.
Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.
Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. EberhardEditor: Paul Macheck
Production: Damian Lentini, Bettina Spörr
Next Episode
Members: Rosa Hausleithner und Sophie Thun
Rosa Hausleithner erzählt im Gespräch mit Sophie Thun von ihren Anfängen als Künstlerin, ihrer Zeit an der Akademie in der Bildhauerklasse von Bruno Gironcoli und wie sich ihre Arbeiten von ortspezifischen, skulptural-architektonischen Interventionen zu gemalten Raumkompositionen entwickelt haben. Diese Folge wurde am 7. Juni 2024 im Podcast-Studio der Secession aufgenommen.
Rosa Hausleithners polychrome Bildräume formieren sich primär in ihren Gedanken. Als kleine, skizzenhafte Linienzeichnungen werden sie mit Blei- und Farbstiften auf Papier fixiert, um dann in Acryl auf Leinwand ausformuliert zu werden. Von der Bildhauerei kommend, baut die 1952 in Wien geborene Künstlerin mit ihren Gemälden fiktionale Farbräume, die sich den perspektivischen Regeln gezielt widersetzen. „Die Farbgebung, einmal opak, oftmals luzid, verstärkt und / oder verführt den Blick des Betrachtens, bis hin zur Imagination eines Kippeffekts. Dadurch entstehen im Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Bildbausteine immer wieder neu definierte Standpunkte.“ (Rosa Hausleithner über ihre Arbeit anlässlich der Verleihung des 2020 von der Secession vergebenen Gmoser Preises).
Rosa Hausleithner absolvierte 1984 ihr Bildhauereistudium bei Bruno Gironcoli an der Akademie der bildenden Künste in Wien und stellte u. a. in der Neuen Galerie Graz, im Künstlerhaus Salzburg, in der Secession, der Kunsthalle Krems und im Museum auf Abruf in Wien aus. Sie war im Vorstand der IG Bildende Kunst tätig und Beiratsmitglied des Kulturrat Österreich. Seit ist sie 1987 Mitglied der Secession.
Sophie Thun (*1985, lebt und arbeitet in Wien) arbeitet vor allem mit Techniken der analogen Fotografie, ihren Räumen, Prozessen sowie Produktions- und Ausstellungsbedingungen. Aufgewachsen in Warschau, absolvierte Thun ihr Masterstudium an den Akademien der bildenden Künste in Wien und in Krakau. Thun ist seit 2021 im Vorstand der Secession, wo sie 2020 eine Einzelausstellung hatte; von 2023 bis 2025 ist sie Interims-Professorin der Klasse für Fotografie an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Secession Podcast: Artists ist eine Gesprächsreihe mit Mitgliedern der Secession.
Das Dorotheum ist exklusiver Sponsor des Secession Podcasts.
Jingle: Hui Ye mit einem Ausschnitt aus Combat of dreams für Streichquartett und Zuspielung (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) von Alexander J. Eberhard.
Schnitt: Paul Macheck
Produktion: Bettina Spörr, Jeanette Pacher
Programmiert vom Vorstand der Secession
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