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Working across various media such as installation, sculpture, photography, video, drawing and performance, Raul Mourão is part of a generation that marked Rio’s artistic scene in the 1990s. Commenting on subjects as everyday life, politics or social constructs, frequently permeated by a critical sense of humor, one of the main concerns in Mourão's work is the urban space. His visual vocabulary proposes displacements and redefinitions of familiar symbols and forms in contemporary society as a means of stimulating thought on the matters of place, urbanism and human interactions. Mourão began his career in the second half of the 1980s. At the end of that decade he started to investigate the visual symbology of architectonic safety devices in the urban landscape of Rio de Janeiro with structures such as window railings and security fences. This process resulted in a series titled Grades, which includes works in photography, video, sculptures, and installations. Since 2010, the artist has expanded his research on security systems while deconstructing visual structures present in these forbidding apparatus, leading him to create his first audience-activated kinetic sculptures. In these large-format pieces, the artist establishes formal strategies that comment on urban violence while also seeking structural balance.