Allan Weber – Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece

Multidisciplinary artist whose work spans a range of media, including assemblage, sculpture, installation, and photography. Through conceptual practices, Weber brings materials and objects imbued with history into exhibition spaces, offering a window into realities he both experiences and imagines. Having begun his artistic research through the social and geopolitical dynamics of the city of Rio de Janeiro, his perspective has since expanded to address questions of global geopolitics. Weber’s practice is deeply rooted in the realities of the environment in which he lives, incorporating the ambiguity, chaos, and violence of urban life. He sees the streets as a connective tissue, transforming mundane objects into powerful poetics and social commentary.

The exhibition Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece is produced by the Ministry of Culture, through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law), and Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The show is sponsored by institutional patron Nubank and supported by Galeria Galatea and Galeria 5 Bocas.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake presents Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece [There’s A Whole Life You Don’t Know About], Allan Weber’s first solo institutional exhibition in Brazil. Bringing together photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations, the show presents a body of work that takes the city as a field of direct experience, grounded in the forms of labor, movement, and organization that structure everyday urban life.

Allan Weber’s practice develops along those currents. His images emerge from the movement that permeates life in the city, incorporating fragments, surfaces, and situations that define this experience. Working with various devices and media, many of them displaced from everyday life, the artist produces pieces that maintain a direct relationship with the conditions under which they were made.

Presenting the exhibition at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, located on Avenida Faria Lima—a financial hub where thousands of delivery workers circulate daily—adds another layer of connection to Allan Weber’s practice. A significant part of the artist’s work engages with this context, reflecting on contemporary forms of labor organization and their unfolding within urban experience.

By exhibiting this body of work, Instituto Tomie Ohtake reaffirms its commitment to promoting artists whose trajectories and practices expand the scope of contemporary Brazilian production, bringing the institution closer to experiences, territories, and audiences historically underrepresented in the art circuit. The exhibition is part of a program that seeks to broaden access, foster dialogue, and strengthen the diversity of perspectives in the art world.

Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece is produced by the Ministry of Culture, through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law), and by Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The show is sponsored by institutional patron Nubank and supported by Galeria Galatea and Galeria 5 Bocas. We extend our gratitude to the artist, as well as to the partners, sponsors, and supporters who made this project possible.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake

Allan Weber – Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece

Allan Weber, an artist born and raised in the 5 Bocas favela in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, develops his practice primarily through his movement across the city. Initially through pixo¹, skateboarding, and photography—practices that have connected him to diverse groups and territories—and later in his activity as a delivery worker, Allan has always been on the move. It is through this circulation that he experiences and observes the dynamics of access and exclusion that structure urban life, to which his work responds by constantly negotiating and challenging these forces.

His work is rooted in the streets: in its languages, objects, codes, and systems of exchange; and through direct engagement with the improvised infrastructures, techniques, and modes of circulation that organize urban life. Ever since his first photographs taken while delivering meals during the COVID-19 pandemic—images that demonstrate the gulf between delivery workers and recipients—his interest extends beyond the image itself to the sculptural and symbolic dimensions that everyday objects can assume when displaced and transformed.

The exhibition assembles photographs, videos, objects, and installations created by the artist in recent years, as well as new ones produced during his stay in São Paulo. Stacked water tanks, suspended motorcycle seats, baile funk tarpaulins, and other elements associated with street and periphery life are reorganized within the exhibition space, establishing supports, tensions, and pathways. Alongside this production, a video room presents works traversing experiences of work, leisure, and circulation, expanding the relationship between image, body, and city.

Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece [There’s A Whole Life You Don’t Know About] is an exhibition performing a double movement: on one hand, it asserts the desire to bring to light the people, objects, and informal systems underlying the city’s everyday operation; on the other, it invites the audience to recognize what remains unknown or hidden: other ways of inhabiting, moving, and negotiating life in the urban space. Allan Weber’s work highlights what he calls technologies of existence: inventions, strategies, and ways of getting by, creating possibilities for life in contexts where access is constantly denied.

Ana Roman

Catalina Bergues

Curators

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¹Pixo (or pixação) is a form of urban art in Brazil, distinct from graffiti for its focus on calligraphy and its frequent placement on highly visible, hard-to-reach building façades. The people who make pixo are
called pixadoras and pixadores. [NT]

Allan Weber – Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece

São Paulo’s private helicopter fleet is larger than that of cities such as New York and Tokyo: more than four hundred registered aircraft cross the sky over two thousand times each day, forming a second layer of circulation parallel to the one on the ground. This aerial infrastructure responds to a logic of socio-spatial segregation¹ that allows a restricted segment of the population to go about without confronting the constraints that define the urban experience of the majority. From above, the city appears as a drawing: continuous lines, organized flows, frictionless movement. On the asphalt, it is made of interruptions.

Allan Weber’s work, assembled in the exhibition Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece [There’s A Whole Life You Don’t Know About], originates from the friction between the city as lived experience and the city as mirage—between the inhabited and the imagined. The show inscribes itself within this divide between those who observe the city from a distance and those who depend on it for work. It is significant that the exhibition takes place at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, located on the Faria Lima avenue, a financial hub through which thousands of motorcycle couriers move daily. Driven by the logic of digital platforms, delivery work is framed by promises of autonomy and entrepreneurship, while in practice it is structured by instability, a lack of guarantees, and offloading risk onto the worker. Their movement sustains the city, yet their labor does not secure financial stability, rights, or an equivalent social recognition.

The city sky, however, does not belong only to helicopters. In many neighborhoods, it is inhabited by other presences: kites cutting across the horizon, barbecues and gatherings on rooftop terraces, water tanks perched atop houses, and baile funk² tarpaulins concealing what is not meant to be seen from above. Here, the sky is a social space as well. These elements, developed through practical knowledge shared in the streets, recur throughout Weber’s work, whose practice repositions the body within urban space, inscribing it in a different relationship to the city.

Born in 1992 and raised in the 5 Bocas favela, in Brás de Pina, Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, Allan Weber develops his practice through direct engagement with the improvised infrastructures, techniques, and modes of circulation that organize urban life. Before dedicating himself fully to art, he worked as a stock clerk, salesperson, assistant, and motorcycle courier, movements that shaped his perception of the city as a simultaneous field for labor, social interaction, and image production. His first contact with photography came at a young age, connected to skateboarding and its immediate surroundings, an experience that remains foundational to his practice.

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic, between 2020 and 2022, a period marked by social isolation and the accelerated expansion of the gig economy, that his photography gained broader recognition. While much of the population withdrew indoors, millions of delivery workers maintained the city’s operation under conditions of risk and instability. It was in this context that the series Tamo junto não é gorjeta [We’re in This Together Isn’t a Tip] emerged, developed from the artist’s experience as a motorcycle courier, which intensified during that period. The camera does not occupy an external position; rather, it inserts itself within this circuit, recording the time between deliveries, the waiting, the weariness, and the suspended moments that structure this routine. His images do not construct a heroic portrait nor stage a direct accusation; instead, they reveal the durational texture of everyday labor. The title draws from a recurring phrase addressed to delivery workers, “Tamo junto”—“We’re in this together”—an apparently supportive expression that ultimately underscores the distance between those who perform the work and those who rely on it.

Formally, his images are defined by the use of filters, sharp contrasts, and the employment of diverse devices, often in low resolution, with the presence of grain and shifts in light, which bring figure and environment into proximity. Everyday scenes, such as the interior of insulated delivery bags, food items, and fragments of routes, move beyond documentation and take on sculptural and symbolic dimensions when displaced and transformed. When focused on people, the images are not stable portraits: bodies appear in fragments, cropped by proximity and movement, following the logic of the scene itself and the motion in which they are embedded. This same direction structures the self-published photobook Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece, which lends its title to the exhibition. In it, Weber brings together images produced during work and in everyday life in Rio’s peripheries.

Following photography, Weber extended these formal investigations into installation and object-making. Elements that form part of the technical systems of daily life, such as water tanks, metal structures, wheels, motorcycle seats, and baile funk tarpaulins, are dislocated into the exhibition space, where they begin to organize divisions, planes, and directions that reorient the body in its surroundings. Viewed from a distance, these compositions establish a dialogue with Brazil’s Constructive and geometric traditions by emphasizing structure, repetition, and balance. The intention here, however, is distinct: these works bring to light what the artist calls technologies of existence, or ways of building, sustaining, and organizing space that emerge from contexts historically kept outside of the art world.

In the sculptures from the series Nós que sustenta na raça [We Who Hold It Up], columns formed by stacked water tanks allude to self-construction solutions and the everyday management of resources, dislocating this repertoire into the exhibition gallery. The same principle guides installations composed of motorcycle seats suspended by elastic cords, in which weight, tension, and balance organize the environment and determine how the body moves through it. Each element participates in a system of forces that sustains the whole and activates the space as a composition in continuous adjustment.

This attention to social tensions and everyday life also extends to the collective practices Weber organizes within his own territory. Founded in 2020 in the 5 Bocas favela in Rio de Janeiro, Galeria 5 Bocas is an independent contemporary art space created and maintained by the artist, hosting exhibitions, gatherings, workshops, and activities for children and residents. It was in this context that Allan designed football jerseys for matches arranged by the gallery itself. Worn on the field and later brought into the exhibition space, they carry phrases dislocated from everyday life into these circuits—football and art. For many of these young people, football remains one of the most concrete ways of imagining another future. By bringing art into this same field of experience, Allan inserts the art space into this economy of desire, circulation, and projection.

Given the centrality of movement through the city in the artist’s work, many of the pieces gathered in the show were produced during his time in São Paulo, in direct contact with territories, objects, and ways of life that rarely figure in the city’s most widely publicized images. These experiences follow those that shape his path in Rio de Janeiro, establishing continuities across distinct contexts.

In keeping with this dimension of circulation, the exhibition also proposes a space for permanence. Occupying Instituto Tomie Ohtake’s iconic round gallery, Allan Weber conceived a room with three videos, articulating different experiences of labor, leisure, and social interaction, featuring a trap soundtrack—a musical genre present in the everyday lives of a significant portion of urban youth.

The title, Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece, names, on one hand, the desire to bring to light the people, objects, and informal systems underlying the city’s everyday operation; on the other, it calls on the public to recognize what remains unknown or obscured: other ways of inhabiting, moving through, and negotiating life in the urban space, reminding us that the city is a contested space.

Ana Roman

Catalina Bergues

Curators

_

¹ Socio-spatial segregation is understood as a structural process in the production of the city, grounded in the unequal appropriation of space, the role of the state, and the dynamics of urban capitalism. See: VIEIRA, Alexandre Bergamin; MELAZZO, Everaldo Santos. Introdução ao conceito de segregação socioespacial. Formação (Online), Presidente Prudente, v. 1, n. 10, p. 161-173, 2003. Available at: https://revista.fct.unesp.br/index.php/formacao/article/view/1118. Visited on: 23 Feb. 2026.

² Baile funk is a music event originating in Rio de Janeiro’s peripheries, centered on Brazilian funk, dance, fashion, and favela youth culture. [NT]

Caption 1

In the sculptures from the series Nós que sustenta na raça [We Who Hold It Up], water tanks are stacked vertically, forming towers whose stability appears unlikely. The gesture is simple, almost literal, yet it condenses a specific constructive logic. In Brazilian urban peripheries, the water tank is part of the landscape, often placed on rooftops and exposed to the sky, making visible an infrastructure that, in other parts of the city, remains concealed. Its presence is a consequence of an irregular water supply and the self-built conditions of these homes. By reorganizing these volumes into a column, Weber inscribes this element within another field of meaning. The modular repetition evokes the verticality of Endless Column by Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, structured as an ascending progression. Here, however, the form remains anchored in the concrete world from which these objects originate.

Caption 2

In the series of works made from baile funk tarpaulins, Allan investigates the formal possibilities of cutting, recomposition, and construction from a preexisting material. Used as tents for parties and community events, these surfaces constitute temporary architectures that transform urban space, establishing a communal space even before any sound is played. By bringing them into the institution, Weber preserves seams, tears, and tensions, reorganizing them through cuts and recombinations. This process begins at a reduced scale, in diagrams, collages, and small studies in which the artist tests color relationships, proportion, and fit. Drawing ceases to function merely as a preparatory stage and instead operates as a tool for thinking, generating decisions that later unfold in space. In this movement between fragment and architectural scale, his works establish a dialogue with the tradition of Brazilian geometric abstraction, without detaching from their origins.

Caption 3

In the series Tamo junto não é gorjeta [We’re in This Together Is No Tip], Weber records his daily life as a delivery worker, from within this labor circuit. His images do not construct a heroic portrait nor organize a direct accusation; instead, they focus on intervals: waiting, weariness, the silence between one delivery and the next. The title draws from a recurring phrase addressed to workers, “Tamo junto”—“We’re in this together”)—an apparently supportive expression that simultaneously reveals the distance between those who perform the work and those who depend on it. In this series, photography does not operate as external observation, but as part of a shared experience between photographer and photographed subject.

Caption 4

In this installation, motorcycle seats are suspended by elastic cords and arranged across the space, forming a field of tensions that alters the audience’s perception and circulation. Removed from their original function, these objects cease to operate as a support for the body and instead exist as autonomous volumes, held in balance by opposing forces of traction and gravity. The suspension introduces an unstable condition, in which each element appears permanently adjusted to the elasticity that sustains it. Shaped by continuous use, these seats bear marks of repetition and wear that directly reference the work of the motorcycle courier, an activity that is central to the artist’s trajectory. By dislocating them into the exhibition space, Weber does not erase this memory, but reorganizes it, rendering visible the physical and social structures that sustain their daily circulation.

Caption 5

Galeria 5 Bocas, founded in 2020, is a central part of Allan Weber’s practice. More than an exhibition space, the gallery, created by the artist within his own community, is a place where art develops in dialogue with the territory’s relationships and practices. Contemporary art exhibitions take place alongside celebrations, activities for children, gift exchanges, and other actions that integrate the space into local life. Football also plays an important role in this context. By organizing teams and matches, the space draws in young people and residents, strengthening bonds that unfold in the artist’s work. This coexistence produces the football jerseys incorporated into his pieces. Drawn from everyday use, they carry names, phrases, and traces created within the community, which remain present when they enter the exhibition space.

Caption 6

In dialogue with the exhibition Existe uma vida inteira que tu não conhece [There’s a Whole Life You Don’t Know About], presented on the first floor of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, this space proposes a moment of pause. While in the exhibition galleries Allan Weber’s work is organized around movement through the city and the infrastructures that sustain urban life, here the artist creates an environment oriented toward rest and contemplation. In the three videos shown in the Institute’s iconic round gallery, different experiences of labor, leisure, and social interaction intertwine. Accompanied by a trap soundtrack—a musical genre present in the everyday lives of a significant part of youth in contemporary cities—the images move through scenes and situations that compose the visual and social universe informing the artist’s practice.

What sparked your interest in art? How did the place where you live, as well as moving through the city, shape your perspective and references?

I learned pixo with a friend at the school I attended, and my father was a pixador too. Later, I started going to a pixo group meeting in Lapa, in Rio de Janeiro, every Friday. It was really diverse: foreigners, rock, reggae, rap—things that didn’t exist in 5 Bocas, the favela in Rio de Janeiro where I was born and still live today. To make pixo you have to choose your tag, the location, the paint color, how long it will stay up—and you have to take risks, you know? All of this expresses each pixador’s identity in the city and, just like art, it’s also a form of expression.

Pixo took me to Lapa, where I discovered skateboarding, which led to my first job as a stock clerk in Urca, which then took me to Ipanema, which got me going every day to the skate bowl at the Rodrigo de Freitas lake. That’s where I came into contact with photography and fashion. All of this built up through my movement across the city. But my first references came from 5 Bocas, mainly through the actions of the head of the favela. One of the things he did was design the jerseys for the community’s football team, and those designs would end up at my house because my father made the shirts.

How did skateboarding lead to photography? And, later, how did the need to make objects come about?

I started photographing by hanging around the skate park in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone. I was curious about the lifestyle and the way skaters dressed. After that, I also started documenting my own reality—because I was spending time in the South Zone, but that wasn’t really my place, you know?

Through skateboarding, I met the artist Zé Tepedino, who was working at the Osklen fashion brand at the time. He brought me in as an assistant, and I started spending a lot of time in the studio. I’d bring my camera and shoot some backstage footage, casually, and then people started asking me for that material to use in their documentation and Instagram posts. Before I knew it, I was traveling with them, taking part in campaigns, and going behind the scenes at the São Paulo Fashion Week.

But I wanted to do things beyond photography, and I managed to transform it into an object in the series Traficando arte [Dealing Art], when I used cameras to make a gun. After that, I kept making objects, but never stopped photographing.

Making objects in general is something that comes from my history. When you’re a child and you live in a place without many leisure options, as it was in my childhood, you have to invent your own toys and games—and I made everything from the goalposts to the medals, using copper wire, to hold street football tournaments. So it’s a practice I’ve had for a long time.

In what way did working as a motorcycle courier consolidate your desire to work from your own reality?

When the pandemic hit, my freelance work dried up, my son had just been born, and I needed to work, so I started doing motorcycle deliveries through an app. After a week, I realized I needed to document what I was seeing—there weren’t any delivery workers taking first-person photos and telling the story of what was happening, you know? So it would be us telling our own story.

With those photos, I applied for the ZUM grant from the Instituto Moreira Salles, but I didn’t have a portfolio and had never been part of an exhibition, so I wasn’t selected. But those images caught the attention of Thyago Nogueira, editor-in-chief of ZUM magazine, who invited me to shoot the cover of one issue. Shortly after, I heard about the Parque Lage residency and applied for it with the idea of building my portfolio—there I started researching art history, met many artists, and expanded my references.

At the end of that process, in 2021, I created a piece by the pool at Parque Lage from the series Dia de baile [Dance Day]—referencing the baile funk parties that take place in favelas, and are usually documented and presented in a sensationalist way, associated with drug trafficking. At that moment, I understood my desire to work with what was close to me, to my reality, especially because those references were absent from the art world. I brought a tarp and a sound system to the Parque Lage pool, to see whether that would still be associated with drug trafficking, even in a different context. Afterward, the newspapers ended up making that association anyway, saying that the favelados had invaded Parque Lage.

While we were setting up the piece, the staff noticed the references and asked me whether there was going to be a baile or a pagode party, and some of them even joined the event afterward. There were people who jumped in the pool and later told me they’d never thought they could do something like that. This is what my work is about: the relationship with the person who will feel represented by it.

Sometimes you speak of “technology of existence.” What does that mean? And how does this notion appear in your artistic process?

The technology of existence is a disobedience of technology. We always have to find a way, to make do, to exist somehow. For example, people who wake up early to go to work and, on a minimum wage, have to find a way to study, to care for their children, to live. And they have to improvise at work too, of course. Similarly, I see the people who build houses and makeshift solutions in the favela as architects and engineers. This way of making do is an important technology of existence.

The piece Nós que sustenta na raça [We Who Hold It Up], made with stacked water tanks, came from this reflection. I always lived alongside water tanks on the rooftops of the favela, and I decided to use them to talk about the necessity of making do in order to live and, at the same time, holding up so much in places like these—because this is the social class that carries all the others on its shoulders. If not for motorcycle couriers, how would people have eaten during the pandemic? What would it be like without the people who wake up at five in the morning to work, riding packed buses and trains?

In 2020, you opened Galeria 5 Bocas. What was your goal in creating that space?

People knew me in 5 Bocas, but when I started working with art, they didn’t know exactly what I was doing, beyond graffiti and pixo. This happened because they had no access to that circuit—there were many NGOs and social projects in the favela, but no art galleries. So I opened a gallery in order to show my work in that environment. At first, people had no idea what that was, and that gave me even more motivation to keep going. Beyond showing my own work, I started inviting other artists as well.

When I began moving through other parts of the city because of my involvement in the art world, I didn’t understand what people were saying, and they didn’t understand what I was saying either. That clash of worlds also happened when people from the South Zone started coming to the favela because of the gallery. The phrase “There’s a whole life you don’t know about,” the title of the book I published in 2020 and also of the exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, came from that: actually, it’s not exactly about knowing – it’s more about accessing, about communion. One side of the city doesn’t know what’s happening on the other side, and vice versa. It’s a matter of coexistence, which generally doesn’t happen.

Many people thought I was going to represent artists, put on several exhibitions a year, and operate like other galleries, but I ended up using different methods. I wanted formats that would bring people closer, especially the younger ones, and I understood that football and parties could be a meeting point with the community. So I created a team for the gallery: they take part in tournaments and have even won one of them. I would also organize parties for children on Children’s Day and Christmas, give out gifts—all funded by the sales and reach of my work. This comes from a strategy thought out specifically for my idea of a gallery: less quantity, more quality.