A multimedia artist and leading figure in Latin American and international Conceptual Art, Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, 1939) was one of the first in Brazil to experiment with the new technologies for reproducing and circulating images. Over the course of more than six decades, her work has focused on analysing, critiquing and dismantling conventional systems of representation. Since the 1970s, Silveira has questioned and expanded the possibilities of visual perception and of perspective through aberrations, anamorphoses, simulacra and paradoxes. Full of irony and conceptual diversions, her graphic, audiovisual, performance and three-dimensional projects comment on the past, question the status quo and envisage other possible realities and futures.

This exhibition encompasses much of Silveira’s artistic research, experimentation and production. It includes a large body of the work she made during the Brazilian civilian-military dictatorship (1964–85), a context of censorship, violence and repression. This is a little-known part of her output that engages in a dialogue with the present day. For a long time, her work was created and circulated in alternative and marginal contexts and systems far removed from the market. Artistic exchange networks and postcard art were crucial to her career, as were teaching and academic research.

Using optical games, the distortion of shadows and interventions on images, most of them taken from the mass media and the history of art, Silveira draws attention to hierarchical structures and symbols of power, including the art system, institutions and monuments. At the same time, the artist invites us to take them apart. As early as the 1970s, she anticipated the debates on social and environmental issues, putting forward critical reflection on the exoticised colonial imaginary commonly associated with Brazil. In the 1990s, she expanded this political and social questioning to encompass the whole of Latin America.

Her work was initially two-dimensional but gradually began to respond to the white cube, to specific buildings and to public spaces in the form of expanded graphics that encourage participation and alter the perception and experience of places. In addition to Silveira’s more iconic works and series, this exhibition includes sketches and maquettes of some of her architectural and urban interventions on a large scale, with the search for a dialogue with the shared space and an endeavour to democratise the artistic experience being other central aspects of her career. The exhibition spills out of the rooms and addresses the public on Les Rambles with an augmented reality piece situated in the Palau de la Virreina courtyard.