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.
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.
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 (Medellin), SAVVY Contemporary and NGBK (Berlin), among others.
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.
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.
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), SAVVY Contemporary and NGBK (Berlin), among others.