Ilê Sartuzi

Ilê Sartuzi (1995, lives and works between London and São Paulo) is an artist who graduated from the University of São Paulo (USP) and holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2021, he received the PIPA Award.

With a conceptual and research-based approach, Sartuzi develops sculptural situations, choreographies, gestures, contracts, tricks, and spatial dispositifs that investigate the animation of infrastructural elements and narratives. Working across installation, performance, mechanical systems, and moving image, his practice explores the internal logics of communication, circulation, and power relations, often through structures that reveal their own functioning. An interest in the dramatic arts has imbued many of his works with a theatrical dimension, staging dramaturgies and choreographies that unfold through repetition without catharsis, exposing instead the mechanics and conditions that sustain them.

More recently, procedures of trickery, misdirection, and parafiction have become central to his research, particularly in relation to institutional infrastructures and the systems of value and circulation within the art world. Questions surrounding forgery, authenticity, originality, and displacement frequently emerge in works that operate through subtle manipulations of storytelling and perception. Across these investigations, Sartuzi’s works often assume qualities associated with the figure of the trickster: disruptive yet precise, ironic yet elegant, unfolding through gestures of sleight of hand that continuously negotiate opacity and transparency.