Yoel Diaz Vázquez (Cuba) is an interdisciplinary visual artist trained at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2009. His work has been presented at international institutions and events such as the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the Gothenburg Biennial, SAVVY Contemporary and NGBK in Berlin, as well as at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, among others.
His projects explore how power, ideology, and colonial dynamics shape social, cultural, and historical memory, while also investigating individual and collective responses that challenge these structures. His practice combines digital and analog techniques—photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking—to transform archival materials and his own documentary records into new narratives, often with a revisionist and reparative character.
In his most recent project, Díaz Vázquez reimagines the historic newspaper Previsión as a contemporary, fictional archive. Through this work, he honors the histories of the Afro-Cuban community and examines the roots of racism in Cuba. Through this act of rewriting, he initiates a dialogue between the past and the present, drawing attention to the traces and absences within collective memory.
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.
Yoel Diaz Vázquez (Cuba) is an interdisciplinary visual artist trained at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. He has lived and worked in Berlin since 2009. His work has been presented at international institutions and events such as the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the Gothenburg Biennial, SAVVY Contemporary and NGBK in Berlin, as well as at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, among others.
His projects explore how power, ideology, and colonial dynamics shape social, cultural, and historical memory, while also investigating individual and collective responses that challenge these structures. His practice combines digital and analog techniques—photography, video, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking—to transform archival materials and his own documentary records into new narratives, often with a revisionist and reparative character.
In his most recent project, Díaz Vázquez reimagines the historic newspaper Previsión as a contemporary, fictional archive. Through this work, he honors the histories of the Afro-Cuban community and examines the roots of racism in Cuba. Through this act of rewriting, he initiates a dialogue between the past and the present, drawing attention to the traces and absences within collective memory.
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.