b. 1978 Mexico City, Mexico

Adriana Lara’s playful conceptual works conflate institutional critique and surrealism, introducing an idiosyncratic kind of mysticism into the exhibition space. Her works sneak up on us, but when they are revealed, they have a way of changing our perception. For her work Installation (Banana Peel) (2008), a museum employee is instructed to eat a banana each morning and discard it’s peel somewhere in the exhibition space. It is a seemingly careless gesture, a trap fit for a Saturday morning cartoon, but upon further examination it can also be seen as an insolent soiling of the antiseptic “white box" of the exhibition space, achieved through the insertion of a small mess of life into the hallowed halls of art. Lara also works another trick of readymade magic with her piece Opening Hours (2008), for which she has simply designated the New Museum’s opening hours as one of her works. Though it is totally invisible, once we become aware of the work we are given an uncanny sense, that everything around us might be in the process of being orchestrated by an unseen force.