Remai Modern announces new web commission by Pedro Barateiro

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Remai Modern

Remai Modern announces its latest web commission, Currency, Currency, by internationally acclaimed Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro. The project will be featured on the museum’s home page for the month of November. Remai Modern’s web commissions are curated by Gregory Burke, Executive Director & CEO, and Sandra Guimarães, Director of Programs & Chief Curator.

The work of Pedro Barateiro consists largely of critical reflections on narrative spaces, socio-political or historical. Using a variety of media—video, installation, photography, sculpture, painting, and performance—he creates generative frameworks and production areas. Materialized in the form of works of art, these spaces are characterized by their complexity, inherent discourse and enigmatic nature.

Barateiro’s newest video work, Currency, Currency, was created especially for Remai Modern's website and features the artist’s distinctive golden pencils. Barateiro has been using these pencils to develop a specific language within his sculptural works, creating a series of projects over several years. Here, the glittering pencils are animated, and they float and collide in empty darkness. Overlaid script appears and disappears, forming a poetic text that unfolds over the course of the video, along with a meditative soundscape, layered with bird song.

Currency, Currency deals with the formation and constant reshaping of a structure by internal and external forces, natural and mechanical. In this context, the artist uses the pencil as object and also as symbolic container; both as an immediate extension tool of the brain and as a device for creating a dynamic pattern or language.          

“We’re proud to present this evocative work on our website,” said Burke. “Currency, Currency highlights the notion of speculative value in relation to the production of an art object. The concepts and issues that Barateiro addresses—language, repetition, distribution and connections between the mind, hand, and technology—are extremely relevant. This work is particularly thought-provoking as experienced online.”

“Pedro Barateiro is one of the most singular and critically engaged artist of our time,” said Guimarães. “His practice is characterized by the way it addresses the circulation of images, concepts and objects between different cultures, geographies and times. We are particularly pleased to have this challenging new web commission, informed by a strong experimental and poetic sensitivity. Barateiro’s work is always the result of a rigorous and systematic investigation that refuses and defies categories or standards.”

About Pedro Barateiro:

Pedro Barateiro (b. Almada, Portugal, 1979) is an artist, writer and performer based in Lisbon, Portugal. He studied art in Sweden, and has participated in numerous exhibitions, biennials and residencies around the world. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Parkour, Lisbon; Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon; Kunsthalle Basel; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; MARCO - Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo; Pavilhão Branco - Museu da Cidade, Lisbon; and Spike Island, Bristol.

Barateiro’s work has been featured in international exhibitions, including the 29th Bienal de São Paulo; 16th Syndey Biennale; 5th Berlin Biennale; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Firstsite, Colchester; nGbK, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; SESC Pompéia, São Paulo; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; CAM – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; ar/ge Kunst Gallery Museum, Bolzano; Le Plateau – Frac Île-de-France, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela.

Source: Remai Modern