Game Art: Artur Silva's "Fliperama Rhapsody" (2010) and "Culture is a Gun" (2012)

An eclectic and versatile artist, Artur Silva (b. 1976) uses various electronic media as raw material to comment upon the state of the world. Some is electronic ludus. Consider, for instance, the installation Fliperama Rhapsody exhibited in 2010 at Half Dozen Gallery in Portland, Oregon. For this show, Silva transformed the gallery into a functioning vintage arcade, or rather, a disfunctional one: the artcade eventually imploded. As the curator for the show wrote,

[T]he artist satirizes the concept of recreating an experience purely for the nostalgic effect. The dilettante enthusiasm with the sensorial experience becomes a marquee to the artist’s early psychological and capitalistic experiences with entertainment.

Silva also collaborated with Mariana Malanconi to create a video that was shown at the 2010 event.

In the installation Culture is a Gun (2012), Silva used a Space Invaders coin-operated machine to recreate the interactions between Kanye West and George Bush that took place after hurricane Katrina.

Artur Silva was born in Brazil where he attended the Guignard School of Fine Arts. Silva now lives and works in Indianapolis, IN. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In addition to showing early on in his career in his home country of Brazil, Silva’s work was included in the 2009 Heartlandexhibition in the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands and Smart Museum in Chicago, IL. His work has also been shown at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne IN; Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, IN; NavtaSchulz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Big Car Gallery, Indianapolis, IN; Sikkema & Jenkins Gallery, New York, NY; Jail Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Half/Dozen Gallery, Portland, OR.

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Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (All images courtesy of Artur Silva)