22.02.2024 \\
The exhibition
Matando el Rato is the first solo exhibition in Italy of young Cuban artist Eileen Noy (1995, Minas, Camagüey).
The works on display – ranging from photography, installation, and video – follow Noy’s artistic journey from her university years at the Universidad de las Artes (ISA) in Cuba to her recent practices, marked by her master studies at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule in Halle (Saale), Germany, handing through her experience in Naples.
The exhibition takes its title from an installation realized by the artist during the residency period spent in Naples in December 2022 as part of the exchange program promoted by Fondazione Morra Greco and financed from the resources of the Global Forum – Contemporary Art Exhibitions EDI 2021 project, per an agreement signed in Havana between the same foundation, the CNAP Consejo Nacional Artes Plásticas, the atelier Taller Chullima and the Institute for Cooperation and Development Italy Cuba, with the moral patronage of the Cuban Embassy in Italy.
During her time in Naples, Noy developed a reflection on the concept of time, harking back to the widespread custom among the elders of her town of origin, located in the area of Camagüey in Cuba, of spending the afternoon hours sitting and chatting together outside the patios of their homes. Matando el Rato, or Killing Time, is the formal visualisation of a contemplative slowness typically attributed to southern countries, such as the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. The rejection of time as a parameter of productivity that restores nature’s temporality traces an underground link between the island of Cuba and the city of Naples.
The works in the exhibition, doubling as landscapes and counterscapes of globalised contemporaneity, oscillate between a local and a global point of view, responding to a broader reflection on identity, uprooting, and belonging. By reducing the distance between Cuba, Southern Italy and Germany, Eileen Noy expresses the questions and thinking of a generation that, renouncing its roots, is engaged in an ongoing renegotiation of its position amid global flows of goods and people.
Text by Giulia Pollicita
About the artist
Eileen F. Almarales Noy was born in 1995 in Minas, Camagüey, Cuba and currently lives and works in Halle, Germany. Her research analyzes human behaviors and how social and political systems, as well as natural environments, impact them, unraveling hidden power relations at play. In her works, habits and spaces are displaced or modified through gestures recombining these multifaceted drives in new staged settings across performance, video, painting, photography, and installation.
Eileen Noy is pursuing a Master of Arts at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle. Previously, she graduated in painting from the Academia de las Artes Vicentina de la Torre in Camagüey and gained a degree from the Faculty of Visual Arts of ISA in Havana, Cuba, in 2019. She exhibited across America and Europe, such as in the USA, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, and Italy; and participated in the New York Latin American Art Triennial (NYLAT), at the Queens College Art Gallery, and in 2021 took part in the exhibition for the Cuban Pavilion at the XIV Havana Biennial. In 2018, she curated a performance space at the Fábrica del Arte Cubano Quarter and was a personal assistant to Cuban artist René Rodriguez.
About Taller Chullima
Taller Chullima is a non-profit Cultural Project, founded in Havana in January 2017 as part of Wilfredo Prieto ́s and his work team initiatives with the idea of producing and promoting a space for exchange and collaboration between professionals from several disciplines. It functions as an extension of the artist’s studio distancing itself from the traditional concept of atelier as an individual space and moves towards the development of multidisciplinary projects and collaborative work. It provides a space to support creation, experimentation and new languages, making contemporary art accessible to all audiences.