Image: Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson
MOCA Tucson will present 'Only In Darkness Can You See The Stars' from October 8, 2026, through February 28, 2027, in the Great Hall.
The anthological exhibition is dedicated to Cuban-American visual artist, writer, and public intellectual Coco Fusco and is her first exhibition in Arizona. It gathers works representing more than three decades of research, combining performance, photography, film, prints, archival materials, and ephemera. The exhibition examines colonial histories, contemporary power structures, cultural appropriation, and the failure of the Cuban Revolution as an utopia.
Fusco’s work combines performance, photography, film, and archival materials to force the contradictions of colonial histories out into the dominant narrative, communicating that unconscious ideologies often relegated to the past are fully operational in the present.
Fusco interrogates these structures through ‘reverse ethnography,’ an inversion of the ethnographic position that proposes an alternative model for performing the brown body, described as the antipode of the West’s strategy of cultural appropriation. She considers performance central to displaying postcolonial counter-narratives, while the exhibition interrogates the tactics of contemporary power structures in the West and the failure of the Cuban Revolution as an utopia through performance, film, photography, prints, and archival ephemera.
Retrospectives were held at KW in Berlin, MACBA in Barcelona, and Museo del Barrio in New York. The exhibition is organized by Gabriela Rangel and MOCA’s curatorial department.
