VALENCIA.- This site-specific exhibition project is located in two spaces, the terrace and the hall of the IVAM, chosen by the artist to hold the theme of equality, immigration and human rights.

Outside the IVAM, a multidisciplinary sculpture made up of 22 coloured iron and plexiglas cubes with photographs and lights that emerge from the walls of the building represents a metaphor for immigration. Words in English, Spanish and Portuguese printed on the walls of the cubes express fundamental concepts from the Declaration of Human Rights.

The hall of the IVAM will act as an interactive space where a performance will take place in a cage located in the centre of the hall. The public and the performers, five people of different races, will interact with this cage. Music and lighting also play a major part in the development of the action.

Playing Equality is part of the acts held to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 10th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Responsibilities and Duties in Valencia.

Júlio Quaresma (Luanda, Angola, 1958) is a many-sided artist: trained as an architect, an activity he now combines with painting. He complemented his education in architecture with fine arts and scenography studies, disciplines that have had a marked influence on his work. At the age of fifteen, he began to exhibit his paintings in his native land. In 1991 he created the Visionista group, which brought out a manifesto entitled O Visionismo and held their first exhibition (Visionista de Artes Plástica [Visionist of the Plastic Arts]) at the Convento do Beato in Lisbon and several New York galleries

Quaresma's work is that of an artist committed to his time and the challenges arising from great conflicts. His paintings make reference to the most serious political and social issues of today. Perhaps because one of his mottoes is "Only man can change society", the artist resorts over and over again to the representation of the human body, and gives the human body an almost sacred place in his canvases. The human body takes on an unusually expressive force upon losing one of its fundamental features, the head, which appears blurred, concealed, disintegrated, etc. The presence of the body in his canvases and photographs and the transfiguration of the head depict man as a bearer of sensations, albeit without abandoning the rationality which has always been represented by the head. This disaccord between head and body, between sensation and rationality, is exploited in his paintings and taken beyond the frame, which is the natural limit of the painting.