Artist Talk. Metropolitan Perspectives

Monday, March 9, 2015, 6pm

From “Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?” (since 1994) 
to “Collective Conversation” (since 2010)

Ricardo Basbaum (artist, Rio de Janeiro)

In English language.

The project Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? was initiated by Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum in 1994 and has since been traveling through cities in Europe, South and North America. In Germany it has been shown at Documenta 12 (Kassel, 2007) for the first time. It starts with the offering of a painted steel object (125 × 80 × 18 cm) to be taken by the participating individual, group or collective, who then have a certain period of time to realize an artistic experience with it. Since the early 1990s, Basbaum has encouraged artistic encounters by inviting people to engage with and respond to systems of symbols and rules embedded in objects, scripts, diagrams, maps, and games. In his projects, Basbaum uses artistic and graphic communication tactics, which are characterized in that they are both vernacular and abstract and thereby easy to learn, interpret and memorize. Through interaction with these sets of visual and linguistic terms for the production of an artwork, he attempts to collectively consider the material, social and spatial membrane between artist, art system, art object, and participant.  In the last four years he started to develop the Collective Conversation, a new series of works centered in the shift between writing, reading and speech. Our will to talk and develop public dialogues (politics of voicing) Basbaum will examine in a new commission for Stadtkuratorin Hamburg.

Ricardo Basbaum lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. His work has been exhibited at, among others: Audain Gallery, Vancouver (2014); The Showroom, London (2013); Biennale São Paulo (2012); Ludlow 38, New York (2009); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2009); Shanghai Biennale (2007); Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2005); Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2004). He is the author of Manual do artista-etc (Azougue, 2013) and Além da pureza visual (Zouk, 2007). He teaches as a Professor at the Instituto de Artes, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and served as a visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (2013).