Born 1961 in São Paulo, Brazil Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Ricardo Basbaum is an artist and writer whose practice is an investigation of how art might serve as both a platform and mediating device for articulating sensorial experience, sociability and language. Known for setting up participatory encounters, his works often issue an invitation to viewers to engage with and respond to systems of symbols and rules that are embedded in scripts, diagrams, maps and games.

Using the performativity of language, the force of tracing and drawing, and the many invisibilities that always define urban space, Ricardo Basbaum has created one of his large-scale diagrams exclusively for The Future of Disappearance as part of the 20th Biennale of Sydney. In it, or through it, Basbaum advances his bioconceptualism to propose to Sydney passersby a poetic–choreographic cartography for the afterlife of conditioned presence.

Ricardo Basbaum has exhibited widely, with recent solo and collaborative projects including ‘re-projecting (London)’, The Showroom, London (2013); ‘The Imminence of Poetics’, 30th Bienal de São Paulo (2012); ‘Garden of Learning’, Busan Biennale (2012); ‘Counter-Production’, Generali, Vienna, 2012; and documenta 12 (2007).