17 DIC 2025 – 20 ENE 2026
The artist Miguel Rozas Balboa presents ‘The Square’, a solo exhibition curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru with the support of PROYECTOR.
Institutional violence has a perverse quality: it requires obedient bodies. The Square addresses this fracture—the blind spot where repression and loyalty become confused—in the Chilean context, but also as a global metaphor for subordination and guilt.
The Square proposes a direct intervention in OBLIQUO‘s shop window: a space of transit turned into an uncomfortable mirror. The images and texts confront the viewer with an everyday contradiction: what happens when the perpetrator of violence belongs to the same social fabric as the victim? What breaks down in a country—in a community, in a family—when repression takes on a familiar face?
The piece emerges from testimony and visual gesture as a denunciation, but also as an attempt at understanding. At its core resonates a painful idea: that the violence of power is perpetuated when it is internalised, when punishment is naturalised, when obedience is disguised as duty.
The shop window acts as a symbolic border: a place where the gaze is returned and the street becomes a field of reflection. The work does not illustrate the conflict; it makes it present, reminding us that power needs to be visible in order to be questioned.
OBLIQUO
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm.
The Square
3:37
2022
Chile’s government has insisted on repressing and silencing its people through abuse, violations and mutilation by the FFEE (police special forces). Its members, mostly from a lower middle class background, blindly follow their superior’s orders while protecting in fact the economic interests of the groups in power. They contradictorily attack and repress their own people, sometimes even members of their own family.
Miguel Rozas Balboa
Miguel Rozas Balboa is a Chilean-Belgian visual artist born in the south of Chile currently living between Berlin and Brussels.
With a strong socio-political dimension, his visual work reflects eloquently providing a personal response to historical and social events, especially in times of unveiled globalization and the crisis of the neo-liberal model. His work invites us to look beyond the distraction of the flashy and to consider the world around us with more attention to discover beauty and humanity in unusual places.
Rozas studied Visual Arts in Santiago de Chile (ARCOS), Würzburg, Germany (FHWS) and Toulouse, France (ESAV) and took part in the Master’s program at the Universität der Künste (UDK) in Berlin in 2013.
He collaborates as a filmmaker and camera operator for a number of TV channels in Europe as well as with contemporary artists from South America, Europe and China.
His research essentially focuses on the ethnological and sociological relationship between politics, mass television and social minorities, especially on the Mapuche indigenous people’s condition over the last 20 years.
His visual work has been widely exhibited in Asia, America and Europe.