Paolo Cirio
Paolo Cirio engages with social, economic, and cultural issues of contemporary society. His interventions and research-based artworks are presented as installations, lectures, artifacts, photos, videos and public art, both offline and online. Cirio has exhibited in international museums and has won prestigious art awards. His artworks have been covered by hundreds of media outlets worldwide and he regularly gives public lectures and workshops at leading universities.
Cirio’s investigation of evidence and sensitive information employs his techniques of exposure, appropriation, and recontextualisation. Using a journalistic, scientific, and analytical approach, Cirio investigates and exposes data, systems, facts, and documents regarding urgent contemporary issues. The evidence he finds, assembles, and presents is an integral part of his work. It forms the basis for his creative, regulatory solutions, in which he invites everyone to take part in encouraging citizens’ agency.
Paolo Cirio writes on the impulse and tendency of forensic, documentary, and investigative aesthetics. He discusses the term Evidentiary Realism, the context from which it emerges, and the tension between the social and the subjective in modern art history, which now can be identified with the decline of poststructuralist aesthetics and the return of realism.
Paolo Cirio was a participating artist in the Framer Framed exhibition, As If – The Media Artist as Trickster (2017) curated by David Garcia and Annet Dekker, in collaboration with Ian Alan Paul. In 2024, his work features in the exhibition Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis (2024) at Framer Framed.