Beto Shwafaty
Beto Shwafaty is a Brazilian conceptual artist, visual researcher and critic.
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Life and work
Shwafaty is an artist and researcher based in Brazil. He has a bachelor's degree from UNICAMP, obtained a master's degree in visual arts and curatorial studies from Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti–NABA and attended Simon Starling's classes at the Staedelschule. Shwafaty has been involved with collective, research-based, curatorial and spatial practices since early 2000s, and as a result, his own practice explores the converging spheres of critical design, spatial politics, knowledge economy, and visual culture in ways that assume art as a productive system able to stimulate changes and reflections on social behavior and cognition when related to historical, interdisciplinary, and public issues.His concerns pass through diverse issues regarding public space, conviviality and visual culture in specific sociocultural and political contexts. Using diverse methods and languages – that ranges from installations, sculptural and spatial situations, design and printed matter to research-based and docu-fictional strategies – he aims to explore the possibilities of being at same time a productive agent, a reflexive and critical actor. In this sense, art production becomes a way to approach the real as at the same time an opportunity to question pre-assumed positions.
The materialization of his projects can be considered as hybrid units of information, assumed as possibilities to generate specific sets of knowledge. Through notions and acts of critique, appropriation and translation he intends to create situations where issues and debates about the functions and communicative qualities of art may emerge and be articulated within certain levels of society and the public sphere.