Giani Motti, born in 1958 in Sondrio, Italy, is a conceptual artist who contextualizes ready-made objects in unexpected ways in works of sculpture, video, and site-specific installations, inflected with what has been called “disarming simplicity.” A recurring motif in Motti’s work is paper currency, which the artist uses as a symbol for the ambiguous materials behind the power structures of Western civilization and in reference to the European Union’s press to eliminate the use of paper cash in favor of electronic money.

His work frequently incorporates performative and politically charged elements: at Art Basel in 2005, for example, the artist locked a stock broker in a cage attached to the gallery wall. Similarly, at the opening of the 2003 Prague Biennial, he asked a detachment of American servicemen to secure the building, who then kept a watchful eye over the proceedings. Another 2005 piece consists of a bar of soap made, according to the artist, from fat retrieved from one of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s liposuction procedures. Through such sensational and perhaps apocryphal narratives, it’s never quite clear who is the butt of Motti’s multivalent, and deadly serious, art-jokes.

Motti has had solo exhibitions and public installations at Geneva’s Pont du Mont-Blanc, Rennes’s La Criée centre d’art contemporain, Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich’s Migromuseum für Gegenwartskunst, Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, and New York’s Swiss Institute, among many others. He was the 2013 recipient of the Prix de la Société des Arts and is currently based in Geneva, Switzerland.