"I am a one-man army armed with my soul".
For the first time in Poland, Laznia CCA presents the work of Rosemberg Sandoval, a Colombian artist whose transgressive art, using the body as its main tool, addresses the issues of morality, death, exile and memory, and constitutes a voice of testimony about the violence and conflicts in which his country has been immersed for decades.
Sandoval was born in 1959 in Cartago-Valle, Colombia, as the last of fourteen children to a family of peasants forcibly displaced from their land - the fate of millions of Colombians - as a result of terror by governmental forces, rival political parties, and large landowners against the civilian population. His art has become a piercing cry on behalf of those without a voice: the marginalized, the disappeared, the massacred.
His works are fury and artistry. The balance between the bluntness of the message and the artistic value...of the vision, its execution and poetics is the reason why, as an artist so deeply immersed in the Colombian context, he crosses borders and reaches important cultural centres in Europe and South America, as well as such collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), Daros in Zurich, or Prometeo in Italy.
Rosemberg Sandoval is one of the pioneers and most important representatives of performance in Colombia and South America. He is a truly political artist. He practices politics by means of art, and performance is a form of expression that allows him to strike the strongest and most effective blow at the complex Colombian reality. For Rosemberg,
"the body besets the spectator with a greater threat in real space and time, condensed, full of consciousness”.
Performance is also a kind of salvation,
"the only thing that allows one to coexist with poverty, with madness and with death."
To develop his concepts, he uses ephemeral, raw, organic or discarded material, intensely charged socially and symbolically.
His art - without anaesthesia - puts the marginal at the centre and destroys it anew to restore its voice and splendour, to give it dignity.
The title of the exhibition, Labriego, refers to an extremely significant issue in Colombia: the relationship with the land. Social inequality, the violent displacement of peasants, illegal extraction of raw materials, the forced planting and harvesting of coca - all these social problems are linked to land management. Labriego is a peasant without their own land who works for someone else, is poorly paid, has no access to a pension, healthcare, or education. All the works presented at Laznia CCA are related to the land and have a common denominator: Labriego.
Rosemberg Sandoval creates performances, installations, interventions, objects, drawings, and paintings. The exhibition at Laznia CCA shows the documentation of the artist’s most representative actions and the installation-intervention Puñado De Tierra ("A Handful of Earth"). On the opening night the artist will present his performance piece EU-ROPA accompanied by his wife Paola Andrea Tafur and his son Tomás Sandoval Tafur.
* Promoter of culture, responsible for cultural affairs and PR at the Polish Embassy in Bogotá for several years.
Entrada actualizada el el 18 may de 2022
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