The Havana Biennial continues in Cuba with two exhibitions that are part of the Parallel Projects, conceived for this second cycle of its 14th edition.

“Creer or no creer” (Believe or not believe), by Javier Barreiro, and “La casa en sí” (The House itself), by Juan Javier Medina, will be exhibited to the public until the first week of February in the Alternative and Polivalent Halls at the Luz y Oficios Gallery, attached to the Provincial Center for Visual Arts and Design of Havana.

The first exhibition consists of a dozen canvas in which Barreiro “addresses social issues globally exacerbated by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic on our planet, according to the website Cubarte.

This young artist, a student at the San Alejandro Fine Arts Academy, uses color and light to reinforce “the distressing atmosphere of different scenes, even where the festive element emerges in a grotesque form.”

According to experts, his work reflects an issue that has been addressed few times in contemporary Cuban art: the presence of crowds, for which curators Dayana Baez Garcia and Mabel Martin Zuaznabar considered including new pieces at the Barreto Hall of this gallery in late January.

Medina’s exhibition, for its part, contains a dozen digital images in which the novel photographer uses the black and white technique for the first time to highlight the tone of denunciation of gender violence.

Curated by Ricardo Lopez, “Casa en sí” shows, in a close-up, the faces of women abused in their own homes, and the author exhibits the physical and spiritual confinement experienced by some of them during the current pandemic.