Pedro Victor Brandão is a Brazilian artist who works across photography, painting, video and social experimentation to examine the present and future of capitalism through research into economics, the right to the city, cybernetics and the manipulative nature of the technical image.,He grew up inside his family's analog photography lab, where he began cameraless darkroom experiments as a child before the business closed in the early 2000s.,
After studying photography at UNESA and taking free courses at EAV Parque Lage, Brandão presented his first solo exhibition, Pintura Antifurto, at Casa França-Brasil in 2011: a photographic panel and 1,800 small prints made from banknotes stained pink by an anti-theft device.,In a 2011 interview about the show he mentioned bitcoin publicly for the first time, years before it became a recurring subject in his work. Proofs of Work, a body of analog darkroom experiments — chemical painting, solarization, double exposure — that he made between 1992 and 2012, was later minted as digital editions on Ephimera starting in 2021 and shown with Portas Vilaseca Galeria at the Untitled Art fair in Miami.
In 2013 and 2014, working with the artist Maíra das Neves, Brandão developed þit, a project on a semi-abandoned plot in Germany that used cryptocurrency mining rigs — sculptures such as Giant Miner #1 — to fund workshops and pay the site's rent.,In 2019 he minted his first non-fungible tokens, Returnable, a series of 12 objects tied to a custom contract that returned a third of each gallery sale to the wallets embedded in the works, for the solo show “Forjada e Outras Formas” at Portas Vilaseca Galeria.,In 2021 he founded the Acerola Fund, a distributed-governance experiment that pools funds to acquire works by artists from the Global South, and joined the collective The Sphere, becoming a co-director in 2022 alongside Erik Bordeleau and Lene Vollhardt.,The Sphere brings circus performers into contact with Web3 systems to prototype new funding and ownership models for live art, an approach known as “protocol art”.
His work has since appeared in group exhibitions including “Histórias Brasileiras” at MASP in São Paulo in 2022 and “Non-Fungible Castle” at Lobkowicz Palace in Prague the same year. His work is held in public collections including the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the Instituto Moreira Salles, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. He is represented by Portas Vilaseca Galeria and lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
