Paolo Cirio, Torino, 1979.
Paolo Cirio’s art practice embodies the conflicts, contradictions, ethics, limits, and potentials inherent to the social complexity of information society through a critical and proactive approach.
Cirio’s artworks stimulate ways of seeing, examining, and challenging modern complex social systems, processes, and dynamics. Cirio uses popular language, irony, interventions, and seductive visuals to engage a wide public in works of art about critical issues. His aesthetic investigations are highly conceptual with layered and interconnected meanings, functions and agents presented as whole closed referential system of interrelated ideas and actions.
Paolo Cirio’s fine art translates critiques of information systems into artifacts to visually document and illustrate social structures examined by his conceptual work. Cirio’s installation art combines images, photographs, diagrams, documents, public art, and videos to engage the general audience in experiencing and discovering subjects, outcomes, and significance of his interventions and concepts.
Paolo Cirio has exhibited at major international institutions including C/O Berlin; Museum für Fotografie, Berlin; Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art of Luxembourg; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Somerset House, London; ICP Museum, NYC; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; MoCA Sydney; ZKM, Karlsruhe; CCCB, Barcelona; MAK, Vienna; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; MoCA Taipei; Sydney Biennial; 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and NTT ICC, Tokyo.
Work at the collection: Michael Rogers
Michael Rogers, 2015
This artwork is part of a series of nine unauthorized photos of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials of NSA, CIA, NI and FBI that were related to the Edward Snowden’s revelations. Michael S. Rogers has served as Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and Chief of the Central Security Service since April 3rd, 2014.
The photos were found by monitoring the Internet public platforms with selfies and images of informal situations published without the control of the officials. Ultimately, the images were reproduced with the street art HD Stencils technique and they were disseminated onto public walls throughout major cities. The artwork satirizes the era of ubiquitous surveillance and overly-mediated political personas by exposing the main officials accountable for secretive mass surveillance and over-classified intelligence programs. New modes of circulation, appropriation, contextualization, and technical reproduction of images are integrated into this artwork.
Work on deposit from LaAgencia Collection.
