Marcelo Brodsky | Jorge Tacla: Upheava

This two-person exhibition features recent work by photographer Marcelo Brodsky (b. 1954, Argentina) and painter Jorge Tacla (b. 1958, Chile), acclaimed international artists whose work engages with the history of political violence in their respective home countries of Argentina and Chile and beyond those national contexts. Both artists came of age during their countries’ periods of political violence (1966-84 in Argentina, and 1973-90 in Chile), when dictatorships responded repressively to the social justice movements that grew out of 1960s protests by committing wide- scale human rights abuses. Brodsky, based in Buenos Aires, is best known as a photographer whose practice focuses on the physical and psychic effects of civil and human rights abuses during Argentina’s dirty war (1976-83). His Tufts exhibition, however, will feature an installation comprised of altered photographic images, sound, and text that takes a more global approach to civil rights, protest, and social justice through its exploration of “1968” in North and South America, Europe and Japan, a momentous year in which multiple communities rose up against political and structural violence and repression, creating a world-wide “revolutionary moment.” Also included is a photographic triptych entitled I Pray With My Feet that features altered archival images of Reverend Martin Luther King during the March on Selma in 1965, New York Rabbi Abraham Heschel with Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and Meyer later at a rally in Argentina, where he lived and was a human rights activist during that country’s “Dirty War” and after. Brodsky has also been commissioned to create a public art “billboard,” in collaboration with Tufts students, on the Tufts’ Medford campus as part of the Gallery’s Museum Without Walls program, that will be unveiled on April 28 and remain on view for one year. Tacla, based in New York, creates paintings that feature images of destroyed urban and architectural forms that serve as metaphors of civil and human rights abuses during the dictatorship of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) but also of the ending of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime through various forms of civil disobedience. Selections from Tacla’s Hidden Identities painting series are pictorial meditations on social rupture, and his ink and graphite drawings explore existential ruminations related to trauma, time, memory, and exile. The March 10th symposium co-organized with the Latin American Studies Program at Tufts, will feature both artists in discussion with two Boston-area historians, moderated by Peter Winn, Tufts Professor of History and an expert on Argentina. The panel will explore the historical connections between civil rights struggles in the United States, particularly as catalyzed by the March on Selma in 1965, and human rights struggles in Argentina and Chile.