Volver Al Futuro

At a time where political and social tensions are beating strongly in our region and around the world, Instituto de Visión presents Volver al Futuro, an exhibition on the historical importance of art, as a generator of thought and reconciliation in critical moments.

On this very particular occasion, we are honoured to present two very special artists: Dan Perjovschi from Romania and Joe Broderick from Colombia, whose works use humour and satire as a fundamental basis to review paradoxes in power structures.
Although Joe is a great cartoonist, he has been best known for his stage work and wonderful performances of Beckett and public readings of Joyce’s Ulisses. Among other things, Joe wrote the biography of Camilo Torres and his contributions to culture and history have helped shape our way of interpreting power structures (which he has always questioned).

Dan, who was trained under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, uses humor and graphic language to create pieces that allow us to understand reality from perspectives that are generally not directly associated with art. From a critical view of current events, Dan reveals through satire, the cruelty of the forms of oppression to which we are subjected on a daily basis.

Through Joe’s illustrations, in which he portrays defining historical moments for Colombia, such as the political negligence during the Armero tragedy, the historical failure of the peace processes or the creation of the constituent assembly, it is possible to understand how little change has been produced by the armed conflict in Colombia’society. His collections of drawings reveal how the Colombians’past continues to be their eternal present.

Dan’s works, tied to international news, digest this moment of crisis generated by both Covid-19 and general social unrest and thus explore different ways in which our ways of internalizing art, society and history have been affected. Both artists, inheritors of the tradition of political comic, have created a characteristic style in which tenderness, disappointment and innocence are mixed. When establishing a dialogue between these two bodies of work, it became evident that the realities of the Romanian Dictatorship and the attempt to build a modern Colombia generate tensions that are manifested in similar ways in society, subjects and culture.