Pending Memories - Photographs by Adrián Fernández Milanés

Untitled No 9 © Adrián Fernández Milanés

The Department of Photography & Imaging is proud to host  Pending Memories, a collection of works by Professor Adrián Fernández Milanés

About the Exhibition

On view thru August 22, 2022, the exhibition takes inspiration from the Parrandas de Remedios festivities in Cuba, in the town of Remedios. Fernández Milanés visited this town for a couple of years, and was impressed by the theatricality and intensity of the festivities.  

This collaborative photo project breaks down the traditional understanding of documentary photography as a medium necessarily bound to reality. 

To make each image visually realistic, Fernández Milanés approaches the process of making each photograph with the depths of a construction project, including details about the structure and physical properties of different elements within a construction. 

"From a conceptual point of view, I believe this work connects with my perception of the Cuban reality and the crisis this country has lived with for such long time. The current paradigm crisis, from a social and ideological point of view, drives the creation of these photographs. The accumulation of similar images reveals a reality that shows structures in disuse, abandoned within the idleness of a depleted territory. The ‘photographed’ constructions function as metaphors for the inert remains of a society sustained by the spectral foundation of memory. The residues of the epic past and the current precariousness of the current moment appear as ruins of the fiction that we still have to live with today."

—Adrián Fernández Milanés

This project was selected as a Juror’s Pick in the LensCulture Art Photography Awards 2019 by Yasufi Nakamori, Senior Curator of International Art at the Tate Modern.