Argentina, 1954.
Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Artist and human rights activist, Marcelo Brodsky was forced into exile from Argentina to Barcelona (Spain) after the military coup in 1976. He studied Economy at the University of Barcelona and photography at the Centro Internacional de la Fotografía. His teacher was the Catalan photographer Manel Esclusa.
During his exile in Spain, he immortalized with his photos his own mental state affected by this migration. In 1984, at the end of the military dictatorship, he returned to Argentina and had his first photography exhibition in 1986, named Palabras. In 1996, 20 years after the coup, he created Buena Memoria, a visual essay about collective memory during the dictatorship, inspired by the emotions and personal experiences of the ones who lived it.
Combining text and image, he blurs the boundaries between installation, performance, photography, monuments and memorials. Buena Memoria has been exhibited more than 250 times, both in solo and group exhibitions, entirely and partially, in public spaces and institutes. His next work, Nexo, was exhibited at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in 2001, at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Chile, among other places. Correspondencias Visuales is a piece featuring visual dialogs with fellow artists like Martin Parr, Manel Esclusa or Pablo Ortiz Monasterio. It was exhibited in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico. La Consulta del Dr. Allende, produced along with Arturo Duclós, was exhibited at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humano in Santiago de Chile. Later on, he published Once @9:53, a fotonovela that combines documentary and fiction, co-produced with Ilan Stavans.
In 2014, he published Tiempo de Árbol, a visual essay that considers the relationship with nature as a way of healing. In 2013, he produced I pray with my feet, a piece dedicated to the memory of the Rabbin Marshall Meyer, that set out a direct line between the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the Human Rights movement in Argentina, through the tight knit between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Meyer’s mentor: the Rabino Abraham Joshua Heschel. Mito fundacional is a visual installation and an intervention on three maps handsewn with images and texts in order to narrate the social conflict and the peace process started in Colombia. It was exhibited at ARTBO2014 and in the Sala de Arte at the Banco Santander in Sao Paolo. 1968, el Fuego de las Ideas, is a serie of 18 archive pictures with manual intervention, raising questions about students and workers demonstrations around the world at the end of the ‘60s. It was exhibited at Arteba in 2015, at Tufts University Art Gallery, at HF Fine Art in NY, at the collective show Archivo Ex Machina in Sao Paulo and at the Rolf Art Gallery in Buenos Aires.
Marcelo Brodsky is a member of the Buena Memoria Association, a Human Rights Organization, and a member of the Parque de la Memoria Council Management, next to the Río de la Planta, created in homage to the victims of State terrorism.
In 2008 Marcelo Brodsky received the B’nai B’rith Human Rights Prize in Argentina. In 2014, he received the Jean Mayer Award by the Tufts University Global Leadership Institute. In 2014 he founded Visual Action/ Acción Visual, an organization supporting the introduction of visual culture and visual education in Human Rights campaigns: www.visualaction.org.
In 2015, he curated “Visual Action – Ayotzinapa, an international photography exhibition in solidarity with Ayotzinapa”, which is permanently exhibited in the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, Ayotzinapa, Tuxtla, Guerrero, and was temporarily exhibited in the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, México, in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina and in a public space exhibition organized by the Centro de Fotografía of the city of Montevideo, Uruguay.
His work is part of several collections: the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the London Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Jewish Museum, New York, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes of Argentina, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, the Center for Creative Photography of Tucson, Arizona, the Sprengel Museum of Hannover, the Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos of Santiago de Chile, the Museo MALI of Lima, the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro, the Pinacoteca del Estado of Sao Paulo, the Princeton Art Museum, the Tufts University Art Collection, to name a few.