Photofusion, in collaboration with Autograph
ABP, will be staging the first major exhibition in the UK of
the Argentinian photographer Marcelo Brodsky. The exhibition
addresses what has now become known as Argentina's Dirty War
in which the state systematically executed its own citizens
and, more personally, the disappearance of his brother Fernando
at the age of twenty two; one of the many victims of a country
devastated by the obscenity of death without bodies.
General Videla staged a coup that forced Argentina into the cruel military dictatorship
that lasted until 1984. The terror resulted in 2,300 opponents
of the regime
officially dead and at least 30,000 missing, most believed to
have disappeared
between 1976 and 1978. The artist and human rights
activist Brodsky went into
exile in Barcelona where he began his training
as a photographer, returning to
Argentina seven years later in 1984.
Buena Memoria is a complex and deeply touching study about individual suffering.
The work is based on a graduation photograph of the class of 1967
at the Colegio
Nacional in Buenos Aires. The picture is the point of departure for a multi-faceted
biographical research project in which photographs from family albums, videos,
personal and literary notes and more recent documents attempting an analysis
of the dictatorship are found side by side. With this reconstruction of his friends´ biographies
and that of his brother Fernando,
who remains missing to this day, Marcelo Brodsky
has created an impressive memorial.
Buena Memoria has been exhibited widely including Spain, Germany, Czech Republic,
Latin America, Israel, Italy, New York and has been published by Hatje Cantz
Verlag, Germany and Gaglianone E.G.S.A., Buenos Aires.
Marcelo Brodsky has written on photography for a variety of newspapers and magazines
and writes a column for New York's Photo District News. He is president of Latin
Stock, a Latin American image network, and of the Focus Latin Stock Foundation.
His photographic series Apertures now forms part of the photography collection
at the Bibiotheque Nationale in Paris.
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