About
Tania Bruguera’s Poetic Justice functioned as a study for a large-scale installation made for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. In that work, panels of tea bags lined the walls of a long corridor and were interspersed with tiny video monitors displaying archival news footage. Bruguera became interested in the metaphoric potential of tea during a residency in India. Tea, originally from China, was cultivated throughout the British Empire. British companies imported tea from Asia, packaged it, and then distributed it back in India for consumption. Bruguera explains, “I had a clear understanding of the process of a return to an original content, of an autonomous culture co-opted and re-packaged so that its originators would consume it, disguised as imported culture.”