Allan Weber: My Order

About

Working across assemblage, sculpture, installation, and photography, Rio de Janeiro-based artist, Allan Weber grounds his practice in the complex realities of his environment. His work embraces the ambiguity, chaos, and violence of urban life by transforming everyday objects through sharp poetics and social commentary. By bringing materials loaded with history into the exhibition space, Weber offers a window into the realities he experiences and imagines.

My Order is Weber's first institutional solo exhibition and brings together newly commissioned works shaped by the artist's personal experience as a delivery rider and by a recent residency in the UK facilitated by Nottingham Contemporary and the De La Warr Pavilion in October 2024. The exhibition's title speaks to the fact that every place, community, or system operates according to its own internal rules. It also reflects the artist's attempts to make sense of the world and impose his personal order, using art as a means to lay down his own rules. This exhibition is Weber's stance on those rules, a statement of autonomy and agency.

At the centre of the exhibition is a new sculptural installation constructed from weathered motorcycle seats, worn helmets, frayed gloves, and bungee cords. It connects to Weber's experience of working as a delivery rider and the wider systems of human labour that often go unseen in everyday life. This is combined with a slideshow of photographs taken by the artist that highlights the bonds and everyday acts of community building found in neighbourhood block parties, barbershops, barbecues, football teams, and art exhibitions in his immediate environment. Rather than offering a distanced critique, the works in My Order connect to Weber's lived experience and his commitment to fostering community as part of his practice. This is exemplified by his founding of Galeria 5 Bocas in the homonymous favela in which he lives in northern Rio de Janeiro. This contemporary art space organises various happenings in the area and hosts its own youth football team.

Weber's work celebrates the beauty of everyday life and how objects become charged by human experience, such as the tarpaulins that shelter funk parties, or the motorcycle seats that drive delivery riders to exhaustion. By reconfiguring these objects in the gallery space, the artist provides a window into these experiences, while showing an appreciation for the mundane, the neglected, and the forgotten within a world of constant flux and transformation.

My Order is co-commissioned with Nottingham Contemporary, where the first iteration of the exhibition was presented from 2 February to 4 May 2025. The exhibition at DLWP is curated by Joseph Constable (Head of Exhibitions, DLWP), Pablo León de la Barra (Curator at Large, Latin America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), and João Conceição (Assistant Curator, DLWP).

The exhibition is supported by Galatea, São Paulo and Salvador. Allan Weber's residency in Nottingham was made possible through the support of Primary.

Image: Allan Weber: My Order, 2025, Installation View, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-On-Sea. Photography: Rob Harris