The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos was born in Paris in 1971. As an artist Vasconcelos is interested in reviving the surrealistic ready-made, mixing it with a certain sense of Noveau Réalisme and Pop, she often starts out from ingenious operations of displacement. This can be seen in her site-specific art shows which are artistic interventions over pre-existent areas. Joana Vasconcelos places her works in dialog and confrontation with different spaces, decorations, themes, and histories. In her art, Vasconcelos appropriates, decontextualizes, and subverts pre-existent objects and everyday realities to challenge the prearranged routines of daily life. Her work engages in an investigation of gender, class, and national identities through the media of sculpture, installations, assemblages, video, and photography. This way of conceiving art becomes particularly clear in her show in the gardens and the inside of the chateau of Versailles in 2012 and in her project for the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), which determined the affirmation of her career within the international art circuit.

“ I am inspired by everyday life and my perspective is led by a critical observation of the world around me. My creative process is based upon the appropriation, contextualization, and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. „

—Joana Vasconcelos