Eduardo Gómez Ballesteros

Born in 1964 in Madrid (Spain)
Lives and works in Madrid (Spain)

Eduardo Gómez Ballesteros has a degree in Psychology (UAM, Spain) and a Doctorate in Fine Arts (UCM, Spain), with a doctoral thesis on the Cambodian genocide. His long artistic career is marked by the use of different artistic techniques: photography, drawing, etching, video-installation and public art. His main artistic project, the GENOCIDE PROJECT, consists of several series of works made by him based on archival images of political violence and genocide. It is a research project focused on artistic practice, history, philosophy and pedagogy. The art pieces created are fed by archival images of victims of violent political processes, collected in the countries of origin of the conflict, and photographs of places of torture, confinement and execution, carried out in the present. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in the Dominican Republic, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Lebanon, Portugal, the US, Colombia, Brazil, Germany, Japan, France and the UK, as well as in his native Spain. Currently he works as a professor of Contemporary Art and Culture and Audiovisual Language at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR).

For KB17 Eduardo Gómez Ballesteros has submitted work from his series HIROSHIMA, S-21 and BAS LA SOCIETÉ SPECTACULAIRE-MARCHANDE. Of HIROSHIMA, the artist writes: “The intentional killing of more than two hundred and fifty thousand people, in the eyes of the whole world, should be unanimously recognized as a mass murder. From images from the archive of The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I converted some of these portraits of victims into photographic masks for a performance. This consisted of asking the participants, dressed all in black, to move and pose on a dark stage with the image as a mask. Thus, the photos take off from the intimate, to become a collective, moving device. I intend to anticipate a poetics of the ephemeral and the volatile.”