To the curators of New York City's ExitArt gallery, the concept of time in Cuba, their metaphorical "before Christ" and "Anno Domini," hinges on a singular event: the Cuban Revolution. After Fidel Castro turned Cuba into a socialist republic, time became dependent on exploring the new political transition and how it would affect history and cultural identity.

"Killing Time," the new exhibit at the ExitArt Gallery, provides an all-encompassing crash course in Cuban art post-Revolution, featuring more than 70 artists whose work explores the subject of time. With its incredibly tactile appearance, the exhibit resembles a children's museum at first – a clothesline of jeans hangs to the right, and colorful mannequins and 3-D ephemera are suitably placed along the floor.

But the exhibit's tone quickly turns serious, and the meaning of "Killing Time" becomes evident. The ongoing theme suggests that Cuba has been "stuck in time" politically and socially since the revolution. And what better way to kill that free time than to create art addressing that tension?

Maritza Molena's photographs, hauntingly beautiful, take a direct stab at Cuba's strictly patriarchal society. In a particularly affective piece, Alexander Arrecha's "White Corner" personifies the nation's paranoia toward racism and violence: Two video self-portraits suggest a double-ambush between the two selves- as they move closer to the corner (and a face-off), one carries a machete, the other, a baseball bat.

The exhibit's pièce de résistance is also its visual focal point – Alejandro Lopez's "Odd Rhetoric Ode," a foreboding lit-up tower in the middle of the gallery, with a winged seat on top and the words "Bunker of Thought" on the floor. The piece itself alludes to a sense of absolute authority, with its godlike wings and militaristic meaning of "bunker" (A reference to the one-party socialist system perhaps?). But most striking is the work's accompanying video, with spliced Orwellian images, more chanting, and a series of ominous messages that tie in the time theme. Among them: "History will be on our side."

The majority of work in "Killing Time" has never before been shown in the United States, and given the tense social subject matter, much of it was marginalized or ignored in Cuba. An odd, recent video shows Castro himself, weakened from health problems, viewing some pieces, commenting on an object here and there. It's a strange disconnect given the art's political messages, but perhaps a fitting representative of the state of Cuba– slowly gaining support while it comes to terms with its past.

"Killing Time" runs at the ExitArt Gallery in NYC through July 28.