Diana Fonseca Quiñones / b. 1978, Cuba / lives and works in Havana

The 5th Ural Biennial Main Project features the work:
“Los amantes” (The lovers) (Video, 2007)
Courtesy of the artist and KADIST Collection

Diana Fonseca Quiñones’s work involves the meticulous, almost obsessive, construction and transformation of simple gestures and ordinary things around her. By mixing fact and fiction, she is interested in disrupting the perceived reality and predictability of the future based on our experience. Quiñones creates metaphors that poetically comment on the ephemeral, yet eternal cycles of life.

In her video Los amantes (The lovers; 2007), the humblest of materials, a pair of burning matches, lean against each other in flame. Their anthropomorphized, fleeting disappearance into the darkness becomes a parable for the vulnerability of human life and the sharing, longing, love, restraint, and death that everyone must face. This poetic work serves as a prologue of the biennial’s main project, not only because it touches on humanity’s profoundness, but also for how it invites us to reflect on the very beginning of human stories. The discovery and control of fire is considered one of the earliest technologies, and the cultural images of fire have since evolved into a rich and multifaceted history. Although mythologies surrounding the origin of fire vary in different cultures, the Greek one has dominated. “Promethean” thought is what gave birth to the development of modern technology. How can we open up the interpretation of fire and thereby recognize and rediscover cosmogonic myths from all cultures?