Allan Weber is a multidisciplinary artist born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he currently lives and works. His practice spans assemblage, installation, sculpture, and photography, embracing the ambiguity, chaos, and intensity of urban life by transforming everyday materials into sharp poetics and social commentary. By bringing objects loaded with memory into the exhibition space, Weber opens a window into the realities he both experiences and imagines.
Weber repurposes the material ephemera of his home environment and culture while asserting the legitimacy of these objects and contexts as foundations for artistic production. Hailing from 5 Bocas, a favela (self-built informal settlement) in Rio de Janeiro, his practice not only reflects his origins but insists on occupying spaces historically closed off to people from the periphery, both socially and geographically.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Weber worked as an app-based food delivery rider to support his artistic practice. This experience became central to his work, raising questions about commerce, service, social class, and labor under platform capitalism. In 2024, during an artist residency in the UK facilitated by Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion, he revisited this research by once again working as a delivery rider, this time as a foreign worker navigating unfamiliar streets. There, he connected with other immigrants, many of whom relied on gig economy labor as their only means of survival. Despite language barriers, he found that shared experience fostered a powerful sense of community and mutual recognition.
Rather than offering a detached critique, Weber’s work celebrates the beauty and complexity of everyday life and the ways in which objects become charged by human experience. This is evident in works that draw on the tarpaulins that once sheltered baile funk street parties, the motorcycle seats that carried delivery riders to exhaustion, and the brown paper bags used to transport meals across the city. These elements are transformed into visual and poetic forms, giving visibility and protagonism to ways of living that, though shared by many, are often overlooked.
The brown paper snack bags, for instance, recur throughout Allan Weber’s body of work: they appear in the photographs from the 2020 series Tamo junto não é gorjeta [We’re in This Together Isn’t a Tip]; are reimagined as brass sculptures, where their folds and creases are accentuated through a geometric sensibility; and reemerge as objets trouvés in assemblages that combine constructive and playful qualities.
About the creation of these sculptural pieces, the artist comments:
“After so much contact with these lunch bags, I started to see them as sculptures, as a kind of social body of the city. After opening, photographing, delivering, and receiving so many of them, I began to perceive them as sculptural objects. They really caught my attention. The creases, the lines, all those marks of use that formed on the paper made me see them as bodies too. That’s where these works were born. Besides, these paper bags are disposable, right? People interact with them just to get to what’s inside. They tear them open, throw them away, toss them in the street, no one cares. Just like our bodies, the bodies of the delivery workers.”
By bringing these repurposed and reconfigured materials into the gallery space, Weber not only documents a particular reality but elevates it. His work is a quiet yet forceful gesture of presence and affirmation—an appreciation of the mundane, the neglected, and the invisible within a world of constant motion and transformation.
Through conceptual practices, Allan Weber (b. 1992, Rio de Janeiro) brings history-laden materials and objects into exhibition spaces, offering a window into the realities he both experiences and envisions. Having begun his artistic research by exploring the cultural and social dynamics of the city of Rio de Janeiro, his focus has since expanded to approach global geopolitics.
In 2020, he founded Galeria 5 Bocas, a contemporary art space within the favela he lives. The space also hosts its own local youth soccer team, furthering Allan's interest in blending his conceptual practice with his community and everyday life. With a creative process that involves social negotiation of power structures, Weber engages with local dynamics to transformatively address aspects of the global social order.
In 2024, Allan Weber received the SEED Award granted by the Dutch foundation Prince Claus Fund and completed an artist residency in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with support from Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion.
His exhibitions include: Allan Weber: My Order (Solo, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 2025); Allan Weber: Novo balanço (Solo, Galatea/Central Galeria/IAB, São Paulo, 2024); The Disagreement: A Theatre of Statements (Group, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Vienna, 2024); Funk: um grito de ousadia e liberdade (Group, Museu de Arte do Rio — MAR, Rio de Janeiro, 2023); Fazer o moderno, construir o contemporâneo: Rubem Valentim (Group, Inhotim, Brumadinho, MG, 2023); Histórias brasileiras (Group, MASP, São Paulo, 2022); A gente precisa se ver pra acreditar que é possível (Solo, 5 Bocas, Rio de Janeiro, 2021); Rebu (Group, Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, 2021); Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece (Solo, Dízimo A Noiva, Rio de Janeiro, 2020).
