HOUSTON, TX.- Daniel Joseph Martinez has been selected to represent the United States among dozens of participating nations at the 10th Cairo International Biennale, opening on December 12, 2006 and running through February 9, 2007. Gilbert Vicario, assistant curator of Latin American Art and coordinator, International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has been named the United States Commissioner.

The Cairo Biennale Commission - Daniel Joseph. Martinez ’s proposal for the 2006 International Biennale of Cairo continues the artist’s creative and iconoclastic investigation into the philosophical dimensions of art and social consciousness in contemporary American culture. The installation will consist of an isolated, life-sized figure directed by a computer to flail continuously on the floor of a predetermined space. The installation – which is partly inspired by the imagery of director Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, itself based on the science-fiction classic, Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – uses the animatronics sculpture as a metaphor for epistemological and social dysfunction. By alluding to the transfer of cognitive structures from humans to machines in the late twentieth century, as articulated by the Mexican philosopher Manuel de Landa, Martinez seeks to broach an analysis of intelligence and self-determination in the age of information technology.

About the Cairo International Biennale - Established in 1989, the Cairo International Biennale is the largest international visual-arts exhibition in the Arab world. The Biennale attracts major international participation along with the leading artists of the Arab and Muslim world.

The 2006 members of the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions that recommended this proposal for support were Jane Farver, Director of the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Paul Ha, Director of the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis; Marti Mayo, Director of the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Francesco Bonami, Manilow Senior Curator at Large, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Catherine Rose, Dallas, Texas; and artist Fred Wilson.

The official U.S. participation at the 2006 Cairo International Biennale is supported by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State.