The exhibition Juana Cima. Una mirada disidente (Juana Cima: A Dissident View) offers an insight into a way of life. It involves the exploration of a journey shaped by the intersection of her memory of the Caribbean, her training within the Basque context, and exploratory spirituality, anticipating key debates on identity, ecology and gender ever since the 1970s. Juana Fernández Cima (Caibarién, Cuba, 1951) emerges as a unique voice, often operating on the fringes of heteropatriarchal norms and constructing aesthetic universes of radical, poetic dissent in which creation and life intertwine to the point of indissolubility.

During her period of greatest public visibility (1977-1997), her works were added to the collections of several institutions, including the Basque Government, Bizkaia Provincial Council and Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council. However, her formal freedom, emotional openness and uncompromising approach to exploring identity placed her on the margins of the dominant critical and museum canon. After deliberately withdrawing from the exhibition circuit –although not from production– her work was progressively excluded from the hegemonic narrative. This exhibition seeks to challenge that absence, reclaim the relevance of her contribution and restore her place in current debate.

Structured around five territories –Bilbao: the first territory of desire and protest; Mythical territories and ecofeminist awareness; Island identity and Mediterranean knowledge; The spiritual path through India and Buddhism; and Mountain retreat– the exhibition traces a journey of not only biographical and geographical shifts, but also layers of transcendental searching and the consolidation of identity. These reveal a profound ethic of relating to others – human, animal, plant or mineral – generated from otherness that permeates her entire practice, intertwining thought, existence and creation.

The exhibition is curated by Garazi Ansa Art Historian (Oiartzun, 1989).

Brochure   List of works