Ismael Ogando

Ismael Ogando (born Ismael Gómez Ogando September 21, 1985) is a concept, media and performance artist who specializes in epistemology, psychology and aesthetics.
Early life
Ismael Ogando was born September 21, 1985 in a catholic family, raised by both parents being academics in linguistics working in the city of Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic, where he attended catholic school at De La Salle, and later at age 16 graduated from the Armed Forces Training Center at the Fernando Valerio infantry brigade, finishing afterwards his studies in Fine Arts at the (ICA) in 2005.
In 2006 Ogando joined the humanities faculty at Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo at the school of clinical psychology. During this period is when Ogando start developing skills in media and journalism, working as producer for two major Dominican television networks between 2008 and 2010, and as columnist and art critic for several local press.
Activism and Journalism
In 2006 Ismael Ogando started to advocate for the LGBT rights in the Dominican Republic, within the academic restriction concerning the topic in the country.
Altogether his work in the mainstream media of the Dominican Republic, Ogando developed grounds for the heated debate concerning the Haitian-Dominican-conflict, joining a series of research trips to the area before and after the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake.
His journalist research about the Dominican-Haitian relation nourished his following artistic researches, evidencing the political agenda behind Leonel Fernandez Reyna and President Danilo Medina exploitation of ultra-nationalist narratives in the Dominican side, exposing their involvement with institutional corruption and the later instance of the Odebrecht scandal pushing Ogando to seek asylum in Germany.
Life in exile
During the Dominican Republic presidential election, 2012, Ogando opposed and openly criticized Danilo Medina for using state funds in his political campaign . The immediate consequence of this opposition forced Ogando to exile himself staying in Miami, then Mexico city and later making a short stay in New York city before arriving in Berlin, Germany.
In Berlin, Ismael Ogando continues his critics against Danilo Medina’s regime. Advocating against the Dominican establishment’s nationalist narratives, Ogando developed and curated an archive platform in the district of Neukölln from 2012 to 2015 which served as a hub for opening key art exhibitions in the city; among them WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER.
Art production
Ismael Ogando has developed a wide career in the fields of art, social activism, gender studies and identity politics. Ogando’s performances and installations play upon dichotomies and paradoxes, highlighting for instance the Dominican denial of blackness by underscoring the erroneous nature of this perception in his performance “Dominican Shower”. Ogando here ritualistically bathes himself, covering himself with thick, white suds that transform his body. By staging these performances in transnational spaces Ogando brought attention to the national dynamic of denial, but also engendered a place of (dis)identification that, while dependent upon national tropes, responded to the realities of identity in the 21st century. Ogando’s work highlights the intersections between race and class, while including considerations of gender and sexuality.
In the same context, his piece "Altar" presented in the 2015 Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, for which Ogando teamed a Dominican classical music composer and a Haitian counter-tenor to arrange an operatic aria in honour of Ezili Dantor, Ogando made a unique binational collaboration to discuss the ambiguity of the Dominican-Haitian border and the inaccuracy of the Dominican history to highlight the shadowed narratives about the Haitian Revolution Dominicans have. In 2016, presented a late stage of his research at the archive in Neukölln about Credo Mutwa theories concerning extraterrestrial beings in relation to the lost knowledge of ancient African civilizations, cultural appropriation in the West and their National Anthropological Archives at the fifth Moscow Biennale for Young Art.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu