Rivane Neuenschwander

Rivane Neuenschwander works with installations, film, and photography to visualize the ways in which chance interferes with assumed artistic control. She utilizes natural processes and even collaborates with animals, such as a group of snails biting shapes into rice paper, to accentuate “organic relationships.” Inspired by the bountiful avant-garde movements in Brazil, notably those spearheaded by Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, she engages directly with her audience using ephemeral tactics. She has coaxed her audience into collaboration in First Loves, where visitors told a police caricaturist about their first love and the resulting scenes documented. She has collaborated with filmmaker Cao Guimares on film projects, seeking to document the ways in which “work, consumption, and art making might be entirely synchronous.” Neuenschwander’s participatory works, which she refers to as “ethereal materialism,” seek an expanded collective consciousness by shedding light on overlooked phenomena.

Neuenschwander has exhibited at a number of venues including New Museum, New York, Stedelijk Museum, the Netherlands, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Florida, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Portikus, Frankfurt, among others. She has also participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005, and the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1998, 2006, and 2008, among other international presentations. Neuenschwander was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2004 and won the Yanghyuan Prize in South Korea in 2013.