Yoel Díaz Vázquez (Havana, Cuba) is an interdisciplinary visual artist trained at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2006. His work explores how power, ideology, and colonial dynamics shape social, cultural, and historical memory, while also investigating individual and collective responses that challenge these structures.

Combining digital and analog techniques—photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking—he transforms archival materials and his own documentary records into new narratives, often with a revisionist and reparative character. A central aspect of his practice is collaboration and co-creation, developing projects that actively engage participants and generate shared perspectives.

Drawing holds an essential place in his career, particularly in early works of an introspective and existential nature, where line, gesture, and form become a process of reflection and transformation, revealing fragments of memory and inner states. He is currently working on an ambitious drawing project full of revisionist nuances and symbolism.

Díaz Vázquez has exhibited internationally at major events such as the São Paulo Biennial, the Gothenburg Biennial, and the Juan Downey Media Arts Biennial in Chile, as well as in art spaces including Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona), Spazio Oberdan (Milan), Museo De Antioquia (Medellín), SAVVY Contemporary and NGBK (Berlin), among others.

Exhibition Description: 

Flesh is an installation composed of a series of drawings that explore the materiality of the body and the shared vulnerability we all experience as living beings. Each

image originates from the direct scanning of cuts of (pork, beef, and lamb), printed at actual scale and manually transferred onto cardboard using carbon paper. The drawings are completed with a charcoal pencil, preserving a diffuse texture reminiscent of old medical lithographs. This gesture transforms the ephemeral into record, as if part of a biological or anthropological archive.

The installation consists of nine drawings of anonymous fragments of flesh and a tenth depicting a pig’s heart, anatomically close to the human and resonant in cultural imagination. Its presence suggests absent beats and heightens the tension between the vital and the inert, between persistence and decay.

The flesh, stripped of skin, face, or recognizable form, becomes a metaphor for the existential and the archaic within our material body. It is brutal and at the same time universal: within these fragments, all beings are united—humans and animals, the poor and the rich. The process of transfer and drawing, slow and meticulous, becomes an exercise in contemplation and restraint, where the artist’s body limits its own desire to move. 

Flesh reflects on the essential struggle between eating and being eaten, between endurance and disintegration. As an archive of the perishable, it seeks to perpetuate the ephemeral, condensing in each trace the memory of a body that no longer beats yet endures as a metaphor of our shared fragility.