The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ December 3, 2008 – March 1, 2009

Curator: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill

Curated by Leanne Mella.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection

Curated by Leanne Mella

December 3, 2008 – March 1, 2009

Exhibition Summary

Throughout history, artists have used many means to highlight and analyze the societal exercise of power and social control. The examples are so well-known – from contemporaneous drawings and Medieval tapestries depicting the 10^th Century Sack of Tunis, depictions of   The Rape of the Sabine Women by Rubens, Poussin and David, and Goya’s Disasters of War, to more recent examples in the post-World War II films of Roberto Rossellini, and the Vietnam-era work of Jean-Luc Godard, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, and others. These images and narratives continue to shock and move us even after, in some cases, hundreds of years. 

In our age, visual artists have seized considerable territory from Hollywood and feature film in depicting contemporary social issues. Through works in photography, installation, performance, the moving image and new media, often deployed in combination, artists address contemporary social issues with a resonance and power that a corporatized film industry seems unable to achieve. The works in this exhibition comment upon, confront and challenge strategies of totalizing power and social control. Issues of powerlessness, exclusion and marginalization, subversion, escapism, transcendence, warfare, protest and resistance are all inventively addressed in this selection of works from the collection of the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection.  

Participating artists: