ARTIST STATEMENT
I am interested in recreating the implication of my gaze concerning the history of women’s representation in realms such as the public and private, voyeurism, desire, and psychological pressure. It’s an effort to integrate into a collective memory of people displaced or exiled from their origins, who have to live in a hinterland between the society they were forced to abandon and the new host, but they don’t belong entirely either of both. Through my own body, I intend to alter my perceptions of everyday instances and reflect on my condition of being a Cuban immigrant in the US. My work is motivated by that space of instability and social pressure generated by having left a country with a macho culture like Cuba. The remnants of a political context masked by the propaganda of the Cuban government and the promises of Wonderland, when the reality for many is the life in the ghetto, hard labor, and hyper-control. It also extends to the pursuit of the “American dream,” which for many also has turned into fear of deportation, low-paid work, and police brutality. My work speaks to the psychological pressure of being an immigrant woman in America. I use the action (Performance/ Photography) primarily as a metaphor for a social experience that is widespread within the community of Latina women. My body’s struggle is the expression of a larger struggle with adaptation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Paola Martínez Fiterre is a Cuban artist based in New York City. Fiterre studied at the University of Arts (ISA) in Havana until 2017. In 2019, she graduated from the International Center of Photography, having been awarded both the ICP Director’s Scholarship and the ICP New Media Grant. Her practice focuses on the representation of the female subject crossed by the experience of migration, the self-acceptance of her body, and its communication with nature and society. In 2022 Fiterre was awarded The Reed FoundationFellowship for Cuban Artists to attend the two-week residency at The Vermont Studio Center. In 2022 as well she was awarded the En Foco Photography Fellowship. In 2021 Paola was awarded the ICP x Tory Burch Artists Fellowship and was included in the exhibition “A New New York,”. She has participated in multiple group shows in Havana and New York, San Francisco, Bordeaux, Geneva, and Mexico City. In 2019 she presented her first solo show at Pen & Brush Gallery (New York City), sharing space with the artist Renee Cox. In order to develop a project about the relationship between monuments and feminine self-representation, she was selected for the Artist-in-Residency Program (2019) at the Pocantico Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
© Paola Fiterre