The Heretic Asserts

The first international contemporary biennale in Santa Cruz (Tenerife, Spain) was launched last year, and remained open from October 5th, 2024 to January 15th, 2025. Considered a peripheral territory of greater Europe with a contested history, troubled geopolitical relations, and a colonial past with continental Spain, the Canary Islands have a unique art scene and a consolidated art community that is open to inter-European and cross-continental collaborations. Initiated by the TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes museum in Santa Cruz, the biennale The Heretical Proclamation united twelve local and international artists who, in their practices, counter narratives of power and challenge socio-political pre-established limits. 

Giving some time for reflections, Anna Bitkina spoke with the biennale’s curators, Raisa Maudit, an established Spanish artist native to the Canary Islands, and Àngels Miralda, originally from Barcelona and well integrated into international art discourse, who merged for the time of the biennale into a productive duo.

Anna Bitkina: The biennale The Heretical Proclamation aims to present artistic statements that challenge mainstream thinking and actions. In your curatorial approach, you have assigned the role of heretics to the artists who, through their art, challenge established power structures and the morality of existing doctrines. Could you please elaborate on the notion of “heresy” within the overall concept of your project? Why did you decide to borrow a more religious term instead of using, for instance, “whistleblower”?

Àngels Miralda: I loved the idea of heresy. I don’t remember which one of us first brought it up, but it is the perfect meeting point between the interests of Raisa and me. There are many terms for an outsider—a visionary, a whistleblower—that overlap in some way, but none fit as perfectly as “the Heretic” for our intended exhibition. Unlike whistleblowers, who are more known for rightfully denouncing rather than proclaiming, the heretic asserts a belief in something specific that is contrary to the mainstream. Heretics exist in all religions and are often some of the strongest believers in the goodness of a system that has become corrupt due to the ill guidance of functionaries or the misinterpretation of morality. Some of the most interesting figures in thinking about this role for me were Pier Paolo Pasolini, who managed to insert himself within the commission system of the Catholic Church while openly being a queer communist, and Giordano Bruno, who was ultimately burned at the stake for questioning the teachings of Aristotle. These two figures demonstrate different forms of resistance against notions of identity, as well as reversing historical perspectives—many artists in the biennial do both of these things.

Raisa Maudit: When we consider religious concepts, we engage with a framework of power in a transtemporal way. This perspective is shaped by the influence of religion (or theology) on social, economic, identity, and territorial dynamics, which have contributed to the construction of the world and its tensions up to the present day. It is also crucial to examine how art and thought have been, and continue to be, influenced by the relationship between hegemonic spirituality and power. Therefore, it is essential to maintain this perspective at the curatorial level, discussing religion openly, overcoming taboos, and embracing the inherent complexity of thinking through this lens.

Within The Heretical Proclamation, you claim to bring together “authentic proposals, both artistic and curatorial, against those promoted by the political-social canon.” Could you please provide examples of works from the exhibition that achieve this and explain how it is manifested in these works?

Raisa Maudit: For instance, there are projects that recover hidden historical narratives, such as those by Miguel Rubio Tapia, Ariel Kuaray Ortega, Gabriel Bogossian, and Victor Leguy, as well as Lamia Joreige. Other works question or vindicate marginal identities, exemplified by the contributions of the collective Al Akhawat (Oumaima Manchit Laroussi, Youssef Taki, Sana El Mokkadim, Karim Khourrou, Aicha Trinidad Gououi y Salma Bechar), Izaro Ieregi, Maï Diallo, and Ezra Šimek. In many ways, all these artworks navigate a heretical approach, proposing not only conceptual challenges but also presenting alternative methodologies regarding territory, identity, and global politics. For example, Onset by Anna Engelhardt 

Mark Cinkevich features a video installation that critiques the infrastructural horrors of Russian imperialism through the lens of programming and medieval demonology. Similarly, Trab’ssah by Saharawi artist Abdessamad El Montassir conveys the territorial issues and violence in Western Sahara across different time periods, revealing what cannot be expressed in words. Another example is I Heard It from the Other Mountain by Carla Marzán, where sculpture made of local materials, and musical composition prompt us to rethink the heteropatriarchal context of folklore and oral knowledge that cannot be translated.

This prism of thought was also evident in the “Mutable Room,” the biennale’s reading room, where the selection of books and publications was constantly changing. This dynamic environment opened discussions about the underlying themes of the exhibition and served as a space for creating multiple temporal exhibitions that fostered understanding. The concept of what is considered heretical is always evolving, and we embraced this idea in the overarching theme of a continually changing exhibition.

The exhibition at TEA includes 12 artworks, both existing and new. During the open call, which was used for artistic selection, you received almost a thousand applications from artists who wanted to take part in the biennial. How did you select the artists and their artworks?

Raisa Maudit: We chose an open call format to select artworks, aiming to create a mechanism for broader artistic engagement in shaping the biennial while also challenging the traditional selection processes of biennials. Through the open call, we encouraged artists to propose various events or moments for reflection, such as workshops, performances, lectures, or other forms of temporal engagement. Once Àngels and I began to review the applications, we also started to identify some common issues and urgent contemporary inquiries from which the curatorial lines were born. We outlined several topical directions: Tracing Histories, Lineages of the Present, Identities Against the Grain, Rooted in Place, Violence Against the Earth, and Methodic Transmutations. Once we detected these common lines, we began to consider these concerns in relation to the received art projects. Based on that, we put together the final selection with the rest of the jury. It was very intense work, but a privilege at the same time to see the works of almost a thousand artists from all over the world and trace the synergies that intersect in the global art world. Thinking about a biennial not from the perspective of direct invitation but from the idea of proposals allowed us some flexibility while also presenting a series of curatorial challenges. This process was very enriching and directly addressed the state of artistic thinking in the here and now.

Could you please briefly describe the structure and duration of your curatorial research, and explain how the main exhibition concept is relevant to the locality of Tenerife Island and the greater Canary Islands?

Àngels Miralda: This biennial was created in a record amount of time. I am very proud of the work that Raisa and I have accomplished, and I am also impressed with the TEA team, who were extremely professional and worked hard to make this possible. We had a fraction of the time that curators usually have to organize biennials, which typically ranges from one and half  to two years, but we completed this in less than half a year. The selection was made through an open call for reasons of transparency and accessibility. Initially, I thought this was an unusual procedure for a biennial, but the results speak for themselves, and it is evident that this biennial is composed of quality proposals rather than relying on an existing network of artists and curators.

In terms of the theme, I believe it is very relevant to the Canary Islands because the concept allows for an interpretation that confronts the legacy of Spanish colonialism and territorial expansion. This is reflected in the values of difference found in Canarian crafts and in the Pre-Hispanic indigenous community, beginning with the works of Carla Marzán and Miguel Rubio Tapia. All of this is intertwined with influences from language, culture, music, and food that come from Africa, the Caribbean, and mainland Spain.

The word “insularity” has two meanings in English: the most common refers to a lack of interest in other cultures, ideas, or peoples outside of one’s own, while the second denotes the condition of being an island. The Canary Islands wonderfully challenge the first negative connotation based on false stereotypes, as an island is fundamentally about connections. This is why there are works addressing Palestine, Ukraine, and Syria in this biennial; the contemporary world is interconnected and present here, not only in the world’s perceived centers of political power.

Now that the biennial has recently concluded, could you please outline what impact this project has had on the local art scene and the wider Canarian audiences?

Raisa Maudit: It is quite difficult to analyze the impact of this project when there is still not enough distance, but the biennial team is extremely happy with the results, which are already beginning to show a new scenario. The context of the Canary Islands is complicated due to the archipelago’s double periphery concerning the rest of Spain, Europe, and the world. The circumstances on the islands are intricate, and there is a territorial and political tension that inevitably affects contemporary art and its processes. In that sense, the biennial has acted as a catalyst for issues present in the insular context, such as identity, migration, and history, as seen in the works of Miguel Rubio Tapia, Carla Marzán, Al-Akhawat, and Abdessamad El Montassir.

On the other hand, the artists expand the discussion of a world in collapse through the lens of resistance from places that have not been adequately represented in the islands, such as Eastern Europe in light of the Russian war processes (as illustrated by the works of Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich), the ongoing military occupations in Lebanon and Palestine, and the Guarani situation (as seen respectively in the works of Laura Mesa Lima, Lamia Joreige, and a collaborative piece by Ariel Kuaray Ortega, Victor Leguy and Gabriel Bogossian).

However, beyond the act of staging a significant exhibition (in both volume and content), the most interesting aspects are the temporal and emotional layers that have unfolded between artists, the public, and the institution, generating something difficult to contain, which we hope to capture in the publication of the biennial we are already working on.

There are so many biennales (big and small) already taking place all over the world; why does Tenerife Island need one more?

Àngels Miralda: This was a question we raised from the beginning of our invitation to curate the first edition of TEA, and it was incorporated into the public programme. It became a guiding factor in our decision regarding the thematic position of the biennial and the selected artistic proposals. From my perspective, a biennial in Tenerife is much more necessary than one that takes place in Europe’s artistic centers because the geography and site of the biennial itself challenge simplistic notions of an imaginary European identity and historical framework that already deviates enormously from Madrid, let alone Paris or Berlin. It provides a new framework for understanding the contemporary that is otherwise missing and erased from global discourse.

Spain is one of the few countries in what is called Western Europe that does not have an international biennial, so I believe there should be one, and it should absolutely take on a de-centered position within Spanish geography. We addressed this issue in a first event after the opening, in which we invited curators Yaiza Hernández Velásquez, Helena Lugo, and Martí Manen to comment on the biennial format. This provided a reflective moment for all of us, highlighting how the centralising forces of culture, which often follow the capitalist flows of markets while simultaneously criticizing them, repeatedly overlook peripheral contexts. The existence of this biennial serves as a resistance against centralization, which is felt not only in the lack of attention toward artistic events in the Canary Islands compared to other areas but also in the common migration of artists to peninsular Spain and beyond.