b. 1979, Turin, Italy
Paolo Cirio’s art practice embodies the conflicts, contradictions, ethics, limits, and potentials inherent to the social complexity of the 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 closed referential systems of interrelated ideas and actions.
Paolo Cirio’s 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 the subjects, outcomes, and significance of his interventions and concepts.
Paolo Cirio has exhibited at major international institutions including Kunsthalle Wien; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Tate Modern, London; BOZAR, Brussels; Vancouver Art Gallery; MIT Museum, Boston; SMAK, Ghent; 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; and NTT ICC, Tokyo. His work has additionally been presented at international biennials, including the Sydney Biennial; 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Media City Seoul, South Korea; Strasbourg Biennale; and the Göteborg Biennial.