“Language is the underside line of all my work,” Pedro Zylbersztajn advised me over Zoom this spring, “and likewise the start of it.” From such a linguistic genesis, important expressions have emerged in modes as diverse as drawing, video, set up, and efficiency, however Zylbersztajn had been grappling with language and the best way it strikes by way of the world—as data, as info, as rhetoric—for years earlier than he took up artwork making.
Pedro Zylbersztajn: three Digestions, 2023.
Born in São Paulo in 1993, Zylbersztajn studied graphic design and printmaking earlier than working in artwork publishing, which amplified his curiosity in discursive networks as a locus of artistic potential. In 2016 he enrolled within the MIT graduate program in Artwork, Tradition, and Expertise, which he discovered a paradigm-shifting expertise. There, Zylbersztajn discovered to contemplate how “the materiality and discursivity” of his observe may “feed off one another,” he advised me. As an alternative of working inside circumscribed varieties and acquainted processes to provide objects, like publishing books or prints, he started to contemplate the very motions of doing, pondering by way of actions—like circulation, assortment, and consumption—in addition to the varieties that these verbs produce.
Whereas a pupil, Zylbersztajn started to experiment with efficiency, which, by 2019, grew to become central to his observe. That yr, he staged Ready Room at Galerie Artwork & Essai, in France. For the installation-performance hybrid, company had been directed to the exhibition area, a ready room reproduction, by ushers who by no means returned to gather them, producing the banal anxiousness of liminal, unstructured time. Zylbersztajn took an interest within the methods we’re pushed to “carry out everydayness”—on this case, to behave as one would whereas ready. As he places it, “every part we do is a small gesture that’s confined by a sure set of protocols that order our quotidian [experiences].” By pondering by way of the disciplinary norms of our social and bodily environments, his work asks, “how does a gestural shift in efficiency change completely every part?”
Pedro Zylbersztajn: Ready Room, 2019.
These on a regular basis gestures are the main target of Zylbersztajn’s current three-channel video Three Digestions (2023), accomplished throughout his residency final yr in Switzerland at Kulturhaus Villa Sträuli. A central display performs looped footage from an endoscopy, a digicam tunneling by way of pixelated innards. Flanking the show are two different screens, every working a video that echoes the primary display’s motion, however meandering by way of institutional collections in lieu of human viscera. One aspect reveals the stacks of a nationwide public library, the opposite, an ethnographic museum.
The unattainable velocity at which we’re compelled to “digest” phrases and pictures can also be the topic of his video Yesterday’s track for afterwards (2022), during which strains of textual content and transient, flashing pictures simulate a form of quotidian, metabolic unconscious. This piece feels particularly perceptive at a time when the inundation of picture and textual content defines on a regular basis life, whilst entry to such mediated stimuli is regulated by revenue mechanisms past our management. By reminding us that what we eat by way of perceptual encounters is formed by—and in flip, can form—the protocols that outline language and historical past, Zylbersztajn’s work asks us to confront the processes that decide our expertise of actuality.