Exhibition

Buena Memoria | Marcelo Brodsky        

April 18th - May 29th 2002

The Gallery of Photography is proud to present the Irish premiere of work by the Argentinian artist, Marcelo Brodsky. Buena Memoria ("Good Memory") is a deceptively simple, and deeply moving, exploration of State terrorism in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibition is built around a huge, blown-up copy of a school photograph "Los Companeros" taken in 1967. Brodsky has marked its surface with brief notes as to the fate of his classmates: some are married with children, some emigrated, some went into exile, and, most chillingly, some were 'disappeared' during the Dirty War.

This series is accompanied by work that is even more personal, where Brodsky explores the legacy of the disappearance of his brother, Fernando.

Columbia University scholar Andreas Huyssen has put into words what Brodsky has said in images: "Mixing and layering photography, writing and video into a multimedia palimpsest, Marcelo Brodsky's Buena Memoria conjures up memories of a Buenos Aires High-school class and the fate of its members during and after the Argentine military dictatorship. Brodsky's powerful memory work on the disappeared, among them his own brother, reveals the crippling effects of political violence on a generation. At the same time, it energizes the public not to forget. The work is artistically challenging, deeply moving, and politically cutting. It successfully galvanizes the artistic representation of traumatic experience and memory with a very contemporary political struggle for human rights"

About the Artist: Marcelo Brodsky (b.1954) is an artist and human rights activist now based in Buenos Aires after many years in exile in Barcelona. He has had solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, New York, Rotterdam, Montevideo, Rome, Caracas, and Amsterdam and his work is represented in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Joaquim Paiva Collection, the Fernando Baur Collection and numerous private collections. He is a member of the Commission for the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism, Buenos Aires, and on the Board of Directors of Buena Memoria, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to work for human rights in Argentina. He runs Latinstock, the premier photo agency in Latin America.
 

For press scans, or to arrange an interview, pleaseTelephone 01-6714654  or  Email: info@galleryofphotography.ie

See also David Farrell's photographic exploration of the IRA Disappeared Innocent Landscapes