Project: Artur Barrio: Actions after Actions, is the first major examination in the United States of this important Brazilian artist’s work. Barrio, who is well known abroad but whose work has rarely been seen in this country, first came to prominence through the performance and documentation of provocative public acts. He played a crucial role in the usurpation of object-based value and exchange systems in the art world. The range of his work and his rigorous, sustained political/economic critique of successive modes of production, exhibition, and consumption have worked against wider acknowledgement of Barrio’s work. Astoundingly political yet allusive, suspicious of traditional media yet reluctant to subscribe to the idea of an “advanced” aesthetic, he has managed, with few exceptions, to deploy work that evades the social-economic structures of the international festival on the one hand, and remains essentially invisible to the object-based art economy on the other. A newly commissioned work will be created for this exhibition, as well as an authoritative bi-lingual publication and day-long symposium, deploying new scholarship and curatorial strategies to contextualize Barrio’s work. Project Dates: June 2005-June 2006