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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is considered as one of the most relevant electronic artists of our time. He develops interactive installations that are at the intersection of architecture and performance art, characterized by the mediation between his spectators’ bodies and technological devices. More than mediation, he seeks to raise a certain degree of need between both parts to achieve the interpretation exercise of the work.

This interaction makes his work something ephemeral but constant; in other words, the artwork dies when the body no longer has contact with the device and reappears in space when a new body comes in and activates it. It is for this reason that his work is conceived as “public and interactive art: intimate game, accomplice, but also evocative”.

These platforms for public participation through tergiversation of technologies like robotics, computerized vigilance or telematics webs concentrate on self-representation, intimacy, intervention and the idea of absence and presence as two simultaneous possible realities

His large-scale interactive installations have been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001), the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003), the opening of the YCAM Center in Japan (2003), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the memorial for the Tlatelolco Student Massacre in Mexico City (2008), the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010), and the pre-opening exhibition of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi (2015). Recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the MUAC Museum in Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. He was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at Art Biennials and Triennials in Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Montréal, Moscow, New Orleans, Seville, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney. Collections holding his work include the MoMA in New York, Tate in London, AGO in Toronto, CIFO in Miami, Jumex in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, MUAC in Mexico City, 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, MAG in Manchester, MUSAC in Leon, MONA in Hobart, ZKM in Karlsruhe, MAC in Montréal and SAM in Singapore, among others.

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