Brazilian conceptual artist Daniel de Paula is set to make his Expo Chicago debut with a solo presentation hosted by gallery Yehudi Hollander-Pappi. The installation features industrial thousand-liter water tanks filled with water from the San Francisco Bay, a site chosen for its symbolic and material convergence of neoliberal history and digital infrastructure. The water contains both the scattered ashes of economist Milton Friedman and chemical effluents from Silicon Valley data centers, creating a visceral link between economic theory and environmental reality.
De Paula’s work challenges the traditional commercial atmosphere of art fairs by introducing a highly cerebral, research-based inquiry into the "infrastructural totality" of digital capitalism. By placing these tanks within a mercantile environment like Expo Chicago, the artist highlights the invisible systems of logistics, finance, and extraction that sustain global markets. The project serves as a critical reading of how ideological frameworks, such as Friedman’s neoliberalism, manifest as physical violence and ecological degradation across the planetary landscape.