Artist Marcelo Brodsky will discuss his recent artwork, 1968: The Fire of Ideas, a visual essay using archive material from the social movements of 1968.
Marcelo Brodsky (b.1954) is an Argentine artist and human rights activist. His work shows a powerful political engagement in response to the neofascist dictatorship 1976-83. It 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. After many years of exile in Barcelona, Brodsky returned to his native Argentina in 1994 after having fled during the years of the so-called Dirty War – a decade of state-sponsored terrorism in which dissidents and opponents of the military dictatorship were “disappeared”, including Brodsky’s brother. Tate Modern has acquired pieces from his Buena Memoria thanks to Tate’s Latin-American committee headed by Courtauld alumna Catherine Petitgas.
1968: the Fire of Ideas 1968 is circulating internationally in this commemorative year, having had a prominent place in the Biennale de Lyon in 2017. It is showing in February in Kosmos-Kultur, AG Photogallery Zurich, and Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow in conjunction with Ffotogallery, Cardiff.