Site-specific Public Art Project (paper installation) Exorcising the Church Project 2008

Adriana Varella’s Exorcising the Church Project is a site-specific installation on the front doors of the Judson Memorial Church. This large-scale installation has more than 800 pages of the Bible with historical images of the inquisition printed on them. The images of the series Martyrs Mirror made by Jan Luiken (1649-1712) – an engraving artist and poet, were incorporated and printed on the bible pages. Varella’s created a kind of narrative drawing with a colossal impact on the doors. Religious intolerance and persecution is as fresh today as during inquisition times.

Adriana Varella is an anarchist artist who has been creating a series of provocative and controversial art works where power, authority, hierarchy of time, of space, architecture and inter-relationships are being questioned.

Adriana Varella, a Brazilian artist now based in NYC, has a long history of controversial public art pieces. Recently in 2005, she created Digital DNA, a permanent public art site-specific work in Palo Alto (California). It is a huge egg-shaped sculpture made of computer boards with engraved words on them such as “Colonizing circuits”, “circuits of power” and “ideological circuits”.

In March 2008 she showed 2 public art projects in Dumbo. The first work was a video installation showing a person going up and down in a staircase, projected on several windows of the same building. Weeks later she projected on the Manhattan Bridge a dead sunflower that became alive.