Coco Fusco

About

This project consists of three murals that together symbolize the erosion of democratic values. The first mural lists the names of all artists in the world, as of 2024, who are imprisoned for their creative work. The second lists the names of journalists who were killed while working in 2024. The third lists the names of environmental activists who were assassinated in 2024. On each mural, the names are organized into a grid suggestive of the facade of a mausoleum. The backdrop of each mural is blurred, but suggestive of the contexts in which these individuals find themselves: prisons, war zones and polluted landscapes.

Interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco embarked on this project in 2023 out of concern for the erosion of civil liberties in many supposed democracies, the escalating death tolls in the wars in Europe and the Middle East and the aggression against those who seek to protect natural resources from extractivism. The attacks on these sectors of society, often orchestrated by states, are not only acts of violence against individuals – they are assaults on our capacity to inform ourselves, express ourselves, and function effectively as citizens.

Co-presented by the Toronto Biennial of Art and Harbourfront Centre and made possible with the generous support of RBC, Eleanor and Francis Shen and the Women Leading Initiative.

About Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. Fusco is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice 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 Art Institute of Chicago, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Mendes Wood DM. 

Fusco 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 (2001) and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). Tomorrow I Will Become an Island, a solo retrospective of Fusco’s works, was presented at Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art in 2023, accompanied by a monograph published by Thames & Hudson. An additional survey of her work toured to MACBA in Barcelona and at El Museo del Barrio in New York in 2025.

• Instagram