Malditos de la Posguerra

The Damned of the Postwar Era: A series of exhibitions focusing on artists who do not appear in from official accounts of contemporary Cuban art history due to exclusionary cultural policies. Exhibitions feature works by Angel Delgado, Amaury Pacheco/Omni Zona France, JuanSi Gonzalez and others. (2016-ongoing)

Torneo Audiovisual

Artists as Sportsmen: A ludic three part project that commented on Cuba's obsession with competitive sports. Artists were invited to compete in arm-wrestling, phone based gaming and tennis. (2010)

La Bodega de Paquita

Sandra collaborated with artist Samuel Riera and situated their performance in a neighborhood grocery store. Participating artists donated works to be sold in accordance with regulations used for food rationing. Neighborhood residents embraced the event with great enthusiasm. (2009)

La Perra Subasta

La Perra Subasta: A group exhibition that casts a satirical look at the influence of the international art market in Cuba and the control exerted by state institutions over whose art is made available to foreign buyers. (2009)

Proyecto Perro

Perro means dog but it also functions here as an acronym for Propuesta Experimental de Respuesta Rapida (Experimental Rapid Response Proposal), an ironic allusion to the rapid response brigades deployed by the Cuban government to intimidate its opponents.  Sandra commissioned new works by young Cuban artists and curators for this project. (2010)

Curadores Go Home

 For this project, Sandra invited artists to install whatever they wanted wherever they wanted in the gallery, a gesture meant as a rebuke to institutional and curatorial control of Cuban art. The exhibition featured a collective mural-performance in which arts professionals were invited to write the names of censored exhibits as well as the names of those who had censored them. (2008)

We Are Porno

 The fact that pornography is illegal in Cuba only makes it more desirable. For this group exhibition, Sandra invited artists to create humorously erotic works in a variety of media. (2007)

What People Are Saying About Aglutinador

William Cordova (Peru/USA): Aglutinador gave me the opportunity to meet and collaborate with other creative practitioners whose practices have challenged and furthered my own perspectives. This type of platform need to exist and be supported because it stimulates a critically independent cultural exchange that benefits the all.

Ernesto Pujol(Cuba/USA):  Sandra Ceballos has heroically sustained a truly independent curatorial practice and embattled alternative project space in Havana for over two decades, miraculously surviving and serving as the invaluable cultural voice that has single-handedly rescued the critical work of unofficial and censored Cuban artists. My 1990s project at her Espacio Aglutinador marked the first time in which two artists left out from the destructively polarized discourses of the island and exiled communities sustained a historical visual dialogue about their Cold War childhoods. Ceballos keeps making sure that all artistic voices are accounted for, making Aglutinador an irreplaceable exhibition space that deserves all our financial support.

FASTWURMS (Canada): We created a new site installation, Amor es La Ley, for the international group exhibition, Brujas pero tambien Brujos, curated by Sandra Ceballos for Aglutinador, in 2014. Sandra created a uniquely critical position on diasporic witchcraft with Brujas pero tambien Brujos, and the global selection of artists, local research and social making was exceptional.

Leslie Hewitt (USA): Working with Aglutinador
offered me opportunities for discussion among artists about approaches to art making  that included rigorous debates over socio-political methodologies and art historical discourses. It was breathtaking. 

“Performances for One Audience” from the series “Clinical-art.”

Event #1 (March 2026)

Venue: “La Clínica,” Havana.

Text on fabric: “We must make peace with our poisons.”

Diagnosis: Complexes generated by canonized and dehumanized concepts of beauty: we are not dolls.

This performance opens a new space for participants and performers at La Clínica (Castillo de Kolhy).

Participants:

Sandra Ceballos

Amanda Gutiérrez (1 audience member, doctor of dentistry, winner of the drawing)

Mariela Brito (witness, actress with the theater company El Ciervo Encantado)

In Cuba life stifles the mind and drives us into such an overwhelming state of helplessness and numbness that creation itself becomes a therapeutic catharsis, an almost physiological necessity.

Starting with my *Expresión Sicógena* art project in 1989, my work has been a tool for expressing my dissent against hypocritical moral standards and the various repressive systems that governments impose on society: racial discrimination, as well as discrimination against women and homosexuals; abuses, censorship, corruption, and the overwhelming and ruthless punishments imposed by reckless individuals in power who generate trauma and psychosomatic conflicts in the citizenry. I explore this  tangle of data, and from that endeavor emerges an effect as raw as its cause—a presentation without embellishment or adornment.

  In recent years, repressive violence, unjust acts carried out by police and the judiciary, and shortages of food, medicine, and the essentials of life—such as water, electricity, gas, and transportation—have created mental chaos among the Cuban population, and this has triggered psychosomatic illnesses. These psychological conflicts spread and corrupt physical health.

In my research, I observed a growing wave of people experiencing panic attacks, anxiety, and depression that have led to shortness of breath, outbreaks of skin conditions, digestive problems, and insomnia, among other issues.

  The Clinic is an intervention program I created in my studio for artists who need to create actions and performances based on these conflicts. It opened with two performances of my own, the first titled “Performances for an Audience.” In it, I presented a formula for letting go of the physical complexes and constraints that many women fall victim to. Of course, in this case the conflict refers to psychological complexes created by a specific pathological physical condition: varicose veins. This stems from the aesthetic social rejection that many women with varicose veins face and the complexes to which we are subjected. This was a healing action that reaffirmed them as a valid natural physical adornment, drawing them with a black marker. “We have to make peace with our poisons” (text written on a cloth at the back of my performance).

The Clinic is open to projects that express trauma, transgressive attitudes, pain, etc. It involves self-psychoanalysis and a demonstration of healing or relief from a specific conflict.

Sandra Ceballos