Lives and works in Argentina and Germany.
Marcello Mercado (Argentina/Germany, b. 1963) is an Argentine-German artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, photography, installation, film, artist’s books and computational media. For more than three decades he has developed long-term artistic systems that investigate the relationships between bodies, images, archives and technology through material, computational and biological operations.
Originally emerging from experimental film and media art, Mercado has continuously expanded his practice across disciplines while maintaining a systemic approach to image-making. Rather than treating artistic disciplines as separate fields, he gradually transformed them into interconnected systems in which drawing, painting, photography, film, artist’s books, artificial intelligence and biological matter operate as components of a single evolving research practice.
Over the past three decades, Mercado has presented his work in museums, biennials and media-art institutions throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. His work investigates how images persist, mutate and acquire new forms of agency within contemporary technological culture. Throughout his practice, the archive emerges not as a repository of the past but as an active structure in which biological traces, historical memory and algorithmic processes continuously reshape one another.
Artistic Systems
Marcello Mercado’s work unfolds through long-term artistic systems rather than discrete bodies of work. Each system operates as an open-ended structure in which drawing, painting, photography, film, artist’s books, artificial intelligence and biological matter interact through shared procedures, materials and archives. Individual works emerge as temporary configurations within larger, continuously evolving systems.
Within these systems, images are not fixed representations but migrate across media, accumulate transformations and acquire new material and conceptual conditions through translation, repetition and recombination. Artificial intelligence operates not as an autonomous image-making tool but as one element within broader procedural ecologies that also encompass manual gesture, biological matter, historical documents and physical materials.
Mercado situates contemporary computational processes within a much longer history of image production. From prehistoric inscriptions to algorithmic computation, images have continuously functioned as technologies for storing, transmitting and transforming cultural experience. Contemporary computational systems extend this historical continuum while introducing new conditions of automation, scale and autonomous recombination.
Across these systems, the archive no longer functions as a repository of the past but as an active field of recombination. Biological traces, historical documents, algorithmic processes and material operations generate new relationships between memory, matter and technological culture through continuous transformation.
CV
Education
Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), Germany
Media Arts / Experimental Film and Media Art
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
Film Studies
Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions
ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Germany
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria
51st Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California, USA
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, Taiwan
Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil
CaixaForum Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil
Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Awards / Grants
Grand Prix Award, Vidéoformes, France
First Prize, Videobrasil, São Paulo (1998, 2001)
Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, 2012
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Grant
Rockefeller Foundation, Grant
Fundación Antorchas, Grant
Konex Diploma of Merit, Argentina
Residencies
Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany
Centre International de Création Vidéo, France
Digital Synesthesia Group, Vienna, Austria
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