Horacio Zabala is a conceptual artist who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Trained as an architect, he frequently incorporates into his work architectural plans or representations of the built environment evoked through language or signs. Zabala’s interest in physical structures elicits an exploration of the very purpose and utility of artistic expression, while also gesturing outwards to the political situation in his native Argentina.  Indeed, the earliest works in this show were created amidst a thriving backdrop of conceptualism and systems art, as well as of the socio-political context of political oppression, between the fall of one dictatorship and the beginning of another.Rodrigo Alonso suggests that the work points “to the risk of complicity that architecture runs in the case of being placed at the service of an authoritarian system.” This makes Zabala’s interest in the architecture of oppression or safety—the jail or the bomb shelter—all the more poignant.

Systems art has an important history in Argentina; it found institutional support from the influential Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) and its director, Jorge Glusberg, who was at the forefront of international trends in the visual arts in the late 1960s and 1970s. Glusberg was ever sensitive to the sociopolitical connotation of art created in an oppressive regime like that in Argentina at this time, writing: “from the viewpoint of semiotics, art is an ideological discourse [….] By way of artistic acts, man can become aware of his social reality.” Zabala’s work, which was shown in the seminal exhibitions of systems art at CAyC, shares with Glusberg an interest in the scientific method, semiology, and how art functions within a society. Later, Zabala reflected: “In the field of the visual arts, relationships