1968: the fire of ideas
Marcelo Brodsky is an Argentine artist and human rights activist, working with images and documents of specific events to investigate broader social, political and historical issues. In 1968 – the Fire of Ideas Brodsky features archival images of student and worker demonstrations around the world, carefully annotated by hand in order to deconstruct what lay behind worldwide social turbulence in the late 1960s. Images of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations in London and Tokyo sit alongside protests in Bogota, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, Prague and San Paolo against military regimes and oppressive government structures. For decades, Brodsky owned and directed a photo agency with offices throughout Latin America. His sophisticated understanding of picture editing, of how they are sequenced changes the way audiences read images, enables him to use text and graphical devices in association with each image to shift the viewer’s perspective and to reveal new layers of meaning.
Artist Profile(s)
Marcelo Brodsky
Marcelo Brodsky (1954) lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. An artist and political activist, Brodsky’s work is situated on the border between installation, performance, photography, monument and memorial. His emblematic work Buena Memoria (1996), has been shown more than 150 times in public spaces as well as museums and public spaces around the world. It narrates the story of his generation affected by the dictatorships in Argentina, and the holes left in it with the disappearances of friends and classmates.
Brodsky´s solo shows and books include Nexo, Memory under Construction, and Visual Correspondences, his visual conversations with other artists and photographers, such as Martin Parr, Manel Esclusa or Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. Recent projects include the publication of Once@9:53 with Ilan Stavans, a photonovella that combines reportage and fiction, and Tree Time, a book about the relationship between memory and Nature. His current exhibitions are “1968 the Fire of Ideas” and “Migrants”, an essay on the refugee crisis in Europe connected with his own migrations. His work is part of major collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston , the Tate Collection London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Argentina, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, Center for Creative Photography Tucson Arizona, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos Santiago de Chile, MALI Lima, etc.
In 2014 he initiated Visual Action, an organization dedicated to incorporate visual culture in human rights campaigns and to work on visual education www.visualaction.org