Diango Hernández

“I would like to play with the word art. It is my aim to seduce people and show them ideas so that they realise how terrible those ideas can be – even when they are truly beautiful.”
(Diango Hernández)

On 4th October 2009, the City of Siegen presented the 6th Rubens Young Artists Award to concept artist Diango Hernández, who was born on Cuba in 1970 and now lives in Düsseldorf. The Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen used this opportunity to show a comprehensive presentation of his work. The survey exhibition included works from recent years as well as new pieces such as an installation especially conceived for this occasion.

Geography and politics have shaped Diango Hernández’s experiences between worlds. Adopting a disaffected perspective, he places his autobiographical experiences within a communist system facing economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the nineties. This background has led him to develop a certain sensitivity, interpreting reality as something caught in varying stages of decay. Fragments of this reality represent an inexhaustible store from which the artist creates melancholy, but also situationist and surrealist poetry.

Installations, assemblages of furniture, large collections of drawings, and conglomerations of artefacts and memorabilia form a universal system of reference. Multiple remains of communication systems and apparatus such as antennae, telegraph posts, school desks, or record players are pointers to indoctrination, to one-way messages leading into a vacuum but never missing their mark, to communication as the foundation of education into a member of the collective.

Hernández’s playful poetic standpoint places its faith in improvisation and the contingent discovery of constellations. In this way, he develops a personal iconography which operates using public images and reflects social imprinting. Ultimately, Hernández suggests a culture of the provisional; the dreaming individual standing on ideology’s ruins.

“Losing You Tonight” received support from The City of Siegen, the Minister President of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Foundation Kunstfonds, Sparkasse Siegen, RWE, the Rheingold Collection and the Circle of Friends of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst.

The exhibition film was made possible by the partners from the circle of friends and service partners of the museum, namely Fischbach Gebäudereinigung, Filmhaus, Georg Maschinenfabrik, Halbe Rahmen, LM Druck und Medien, RWE and Firma Emil Weber.