In this talk, Mrinalini Tankha will discuss contemporary Cuban visual, performance and digital artists that incorporate coins, banknotes and other alternative currencies into their artistic practice as important vehicles of political and cultural critique. These artists critically engage with questions around the aesthetic and material power of the money form and the global politics of systems of circulation as well as Cuba’s own controversial dual currency system that has foregrounded the contradictions between its commitment to state socialism and its re-insertion into a global capitalist economy.
Mrinalini Tankha is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Money Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine. She is an economic and cultural anthropologist and has done extensive research on money and multiple currency exchange, informal economies and shifting forms of labor and value in Cuba and Latin America and the Caribbean.
This ART 158 lecture series event took place on December 1, 2016, in the University of Utah Art Building, Salt Lake City, UT. Made possible through the generous support of the Carmen Morton Christensen Endowment, the University of Utah Department of Art & Art History, the College of Fine Arts, and ASUU.
