CIFO awards Levi Orta for his project "National Record".

Levi Orta has been awarded a prize by CIFO's Grants and Commissions Emerging Artists 2024 program along with Luciana Lamothe, Paula Coñoepan, Daniel Guerra, Ishmael Randall-Weeks, Glenda León, Patricia Belli and Ana Gallardo. The work he presented, National Record, is currently on display in Madrid at El Apartamento. It can be visited until February 10, 2024.  

About this installation, Levi Orta tells us that it is a project developed since 2020. Its starting point corresponds to a moment in which Cuba began to apply a group of measures that hurt the freedom of artistic expression and citizenship. He decided to hand over to the authorities the credentials that endorsed him as an artist together with a letter in which he clearly explained his motives and let it be seen that his opinion in relation to such policies was that the government understood that artists should only dedicate themselves to "moving shapes and colors". In a cynical way he decided to please the government and dedicated himself for more than three years only to "move shapes and colors". That is why he began to train professionally to compete in international Rubik's Cube competitions on behalf of Cuba. In two years he managed to break eleven national records.

For Levi Orta, assuming this attitude meant his reinvention as an artist, but also a way of positioning himself against the Art Institution. The Rubik for him became a political statement against an oppressive measure that affects freedom of expression and creation.

National Record is part of the exhibition Adiós España, a project made up of three installation-essays through which the artist presents himself as a social being to the Spanish art circuit, of which he has been an active part for the last fifteen years.

In "National Record," Levi begins to reevaluate and take charge of his own place within the technology of power: his privileges, his spaces of representation, his origins and belongings. 

Daleysi Moya