Courtney Levine (Hyperallergic) reviews Tactics for Remembering, on view through January 25, 2026, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (near Washington, DC). The exhibition includes work by Amalia Caputo (Venezuela), Reynier Leyva Novo (Cuba), and Lisu Vega (U.S./Venezuela) with Carlos Pedreañez (Venezuela). As Levine explains, the exhibition “offers an immersive reclamation of memory and identity in all their fluidity and impermanence.” [Also see our previous post Exhibition: Tactics for Remembering.]
Otherworldly forms greet you at the entrance to the exhibition, transporting you into a kaleidoscopic, dream-like space. A voice speaks in the background as projected images dance across the forms, animating the space. “It’s been really beautiful to see her work come alive, become a landscape … where you can traverse and kind of get lost,” curator Fabiola R. Delgado says of Lisu Vega’s “The Uncertain Future of Absence (El Futuro Incierto de la Ausencia)” (2025). Vega’s work is on display in Tactics for Remembering, on view through January 25 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, along with those by Reynier Leyva Novo and Amalia Caputo.
Shortly into the new year, the Trump administration carried out strikes on Caracas, Venezuela, and abducted President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro’s removal brought relief to many Venezuelan expats. But coupled with legally dubious boat strikes, detentions, and deportations already dominating recent headlines around Venezuela and the Caribbean, fear and confusion continue to radiate outward from DC to diasporas in the region. [. . .] R. Delgado planned this exhibition long before the Trump administration’s machinations to showcase the works of Venezuelan and Cuban artists through a Caribbean lens. There’s no overt activist messaging in the artworks, but the circumstances surrounding this exhibition, both in terms of physical proximity and timing, impart new meaning for viewers to consider. [. . .]
The region encompassing the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV), home to a growing number of Cuban and Venezuelan diasporic populations, has seen more than 940 immigration arrests just between August and September, and a 350% increase in ICE arrests in the state of Virginia in the past year, leading to a palpable unease in the area. As the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) humanitarian parole program allowing nationals to apply for a temporary two-year stay in the US was revoked this past summer, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) terminated for Venezuela in November, and new green card and citizenship applications also recently halted, more communities are at risk due to a sudden loss of protected status or legal residency. That risk is amplified by the uncertainty surrounding Venezuela’s recent upheaval, with mixed emotions and prospects for the future, as well as corresponding threats to other countries in the region.
The works in Tactics for Remembering speak directly and implicitly to the fundamental nature of migration generally, and to the sociopolitical and economic conditions specific to both Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants and parolees — conditions that have not improved in either country of origin. Against this backdrop of politicization, dehumanization, and uncertainty, this exhibition acts as a foil to prevailing media imagery of immigrants reduced to villains, victims, or collateral damage. Instead, it offers an immersive reclamation of memory and identity in all their fluidity and impermanence. [. . .]
Across the hallway are works by Reynier Leyva Novo and Amalia Caputo. Novo’s “Solid Void” (2022–25) is a collection of 50 objects cast in white gypsum cement arranged on shelves. These items are at once familiar and unexpected, with some instantly recognizable — a margarita glass, a Solo cup, a juice pitcher — and others abstracted and unidentifiable. Each is the cast of a hollow vessel; the assemblage of the forms could pass for a cabinet of curiosities or a bookshelf in your neighbor’s home. [. . .]
Directly opposite Novo’s work, Caputo’s video installation plays on a loop. The four-minute “La casa (de Hestia) [The House (of Hestia)]” (2010) depicts a woman dragging a dollhouse by ropes along a beach toward the water. The woman’s dress and the exterior of the dollhouse are a matching flamingo pink, a shade common to homes in the Caribbean. The title’s reference to Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth and home, coupled with stereotypical associations of femininity, brings the role of women as mothers and keepers of “home” in the process of migration into focus. Then, the dollhouse breaks apart across the sand, and the ropes ensnare the woman as she pulls the unwieldy house behind her. Caputo explains, “the transit, the woman carrying the weight of the home, the migration …. There’s a double message here dealing with womanhood and everything that grounds us as women … and about exile and migration.” [. . .]
Together, Caputo and Novo’s works reflect on what we carry when leaving our home behind. As R. Delgado puts it, the connection between Venezuela and Cuba overrides the arbitrariness of human-made borders: “The Caribbean Sea is the thing that both unites us and separates us.” [. . .]
For full article, see https://hyperallergic.com/visions-of-venezuela-and-cuba-from-exile/?ref=daily-newsletter
For more information on the exhibition, see https://mocaarlington.org/exhibits/2025/global-spotlight-tactics-for-remembering/
[Shown above: Installation view of Amalia Caputo, “La casa (de Hestia) [The House (Of Hestia)]” (2010), single channel video (all photos Courtney Levine/Hyperallergic).]
Courtney Levine (Hyperallergic) reviews Tactics for Remembering, on view through January 25, 2026, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (near Washington, DC). The exhibition includes work by Amalia Caputo (Venezuela), Reynier Leyva Novo (Cuba), and Lisu Vega (U.S./Venezuela) with Carlos Pedreañez (Venezuela). As Levine explains, the exhibition “offers an immersive reclamation of memory and identity in
