Coco Fusco: Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars
October 8, 2026 – February 2027
Great Hall
Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars is an anthological exhibition dedicated to Coco Fusco. After a series of retrospectives held in KW, Berlin; MACBA, Barcelona; and Museo del Barrio, NY; Fusco’s journey through the arts is situated in her roots as a Cuban-American visual artist, writer, and public intellectual. Fusco’s work combines performance, photography, film, and archival materials to force the contradictions of colonial histories out into the dominant narrative – communicating that the unconscious ideologies which we often relegate to the past are fully operational in the present. The title a borrowed quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars gathers works that represent over three decades of research which make visible the mechanisms of violence through various modes of representation and labor.
The anthology of works aims to expose the separation between thinking and action, exploring the grey zones between the contemporary power structures which deprive individuals of agency. Fusco interrogates these structures through ‘reverse ethnography’: an inversion of the ethnographic position which proposes an alternative model for performing the brown body – the antipode of the West’s strategy of cultural appropriation. By appropriating the racialized ‘Other,’ a fabrication by Western visual culture and mass media, Fusco challenges the cultural imaginary of ‘multiculturalism,’ which keeps dynamic identities in a fixed place, only permitted visibility as long as they perform difference.
Fusco considers performance central to display postcolonial counter narratives. Through the medium of performance, film, photography, prints, and archival ephemera, Only in Darkness Can You See the Stars interrogates the tactics of contemporary power structures in the West and failure of the Cuban Revolution as an utopia. This anthology is the artist’s first exhibition in Arizona.
This exhibition is organized by Gabriela Rangel and the curatorial department at MOCA. Exhibition design and production by YeRin Kim, with the collaboration of Germenes Studio, Mexico City.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Ford Foundation, Teiger Foundation; Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Arizona Commission on the Arts; Community Foundation of Southern Arizona; and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees and Members. In-kind support provided by Mendes Wood DM.
About the artist
Coco Fusco (b. 1960, New York City) is a visual artist, writer, pedagogue, and public intellectual. Fusco’s work emerged in the early 1990s as a central cultural critic of contemporary Cuban visual culture.
Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015), English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She currently teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City and contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and Hyperallergic.