Exhibitions
Goya looks at war again from Colombia
Few images in the history of Western art retain such a powerful capacity to engage the viewer as Francisco de Goya's The Disasters of War . The complete series, comprised of 80 etchings created between 1810 and 1820 in response to the Spanish War of Independence, will arrive at FRAGMENTOS, Espacio de Arte y Memoria (Art and Memory Space), in Colombia, where it will be on display from September 5th until January 17th, 2027.
Far from chronicling events or offering a patriotic and military exaltation, Goya turned his gaze toward the most devastating consequences of war. The suffering of bodies, hunger, misery, executions, mutilations, and the degradation of life occupy the center of a series that, more than two centuries later, retains its undiminished capacity to question violence and its mechanisms.
The exhibition proposes a dialogue between Goya's engravings, a counter-monument by the artist Doris Salcedo, seven poems by authors from different countries, and three choral and memorial performances developed in collaboration with PRESENCIAS – Sonidos & Ecos. The whole stems from a question that transcends different eras and geographies: if we know the suffering that war produces, why do we continue to resort to it?
The 80 prints will be distributed around the two main rooms of FRAGMENTOS, in a tour that will begin in Room 3 and conclude in Room 1. Extreme violence, hunger and misery, criticism of power and fanaticism, and images of mutilations and executions will be in dialogue with a selection of poems written between 1923 and 2022.
The words of Osip Mandelstam, Warsan Shire, Miguel Hernández, Najwan Darwish, Paul Celan, Piedad Bonnett, and Mahmud Darwish will accompany Goya's images and establish a dialogue between different historical experiences of violence. The poems "The Century ," " House ," " The War ," " Exhausted on the Cross ," "Song to a Lady in the Shadows ," " I Ask Pain to Persevere," and "The Earth Narrows for Us" thus expand the scope of an exhibition that understands memory as a tool for confronting the present.
This visual and literary dimension will be complemented by three choral and memorial performances entitled "Presences of Human Fragility ," conceived in conjunction with the musical program "PRESENCES – Sounds & Echoes," from the Cultural Heritage Department of the National University of Colombia. Under the artistic direction of María Belén Sáez de Ibarra and the choral direction of María Jimena Barreto, the Voices of Our Time choir will perform works constructed from the voice, silence, and human fragility.
The three actions will be linked to different emotional and historical states of the country: promise, fracture, and persistence. Music and voice are thus incorporated into a project that seeks not only to recover a fundamental series in the history of art, but also to activate new ways of approaching memory and the wounds left by violence.
In The Disasters of War , Goya transformed the horror of a specific conflict into a reflection of universal scope. His images do not glorify the battle nor create heroes: they show the consequences for those who suffer it. This perspective, born in the context of early 19th-century Spain, finds in Colombia a new space from which to reformulate questions about violence, memory, and the human capacity to repeat what it already knows.
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