Henrique Faría Fine Art is pleased to present “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect”, the first New York solo show by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, in collaboration with Media Farzin.

This body of work entangles modernist art with global politics of oil to offer the viewer a narrative of unexpected connections that borders on the absurd. These two series, “Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect” and “Modern Entanglements, US interventions" were the result of several years of collaboration of Balteo Yazbeck with art historian Media Farzin and addresses the cultural symmetry between their respective countries, Venezuela and Iran, which led them to investigate the hidden origins of the Cold War.

Their narrative sketches out the intersection of foreign policy and corporate interest that has controlled the distribution of global power since World War II,  revealing a delicate Cold War balance of oil and bombs.

Balteo Yazbeck’s work is informed by historic conceptual art. He uses exhibition design as a medium to create an aura of curatorial authority for his work. His approach undermines the notion of authorship through explicitly quoting, appropriating or collaboratively incorporating the work of other artists, curators, and historians.

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck (Caracas, 1972) studied design and fine arts in Caracas, and graduated with an emphasis on sculpture.  He worked between Caracas and New York from 2000 to 2010, and is now based in Berlin. Since the mid-nineties, his work has been shown extensively in museums and galleries throughout the world, and is represented in many institutional and private collections. In 2008, Balteo Yazbeck had his first US solo exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. He participated in the second Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan in 2009, and will be taking part the next Istanbul Biennale in 2011.

Media Farzin is an art historian and critic. Her writings on contemporary art have appeared in Tehran Avenue, Bidoun, Art Agenda and Art in America online. She has a BA in Fine Arts from Tehran University, an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Art History at the City University of New York, working on interdisciplinary American art in the postwar period, particularly language-based work of the 1950s-1970s.