Cildo Meireles was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil fell under military control following a coup d’état in 1964 and every form of expression became subject to censorship in 1968 after Institutional Act No. 5 decreed the end of civil liberties and freedom of expression. The regulations concerning creativity and controls on ideology had a profound effect on the activities of artists and intellectuals. From the beginning of the 1970s, Meireles began a quiet campaign against this oppressive regime, becoming involved in politics in a novel fashion. He worked on an alternate currency project, in which he produced dollar bills, Zero Dollar (1978-84), which bore the image of Uncle Sam in the center, as well as the currency of Brazil, Zero Centavo (1974-78) and Zero Cruzeiro (1974-78), bearing the image of a native Brazilian. These banknotes appear genuine at first glance but were produced to question the symbolic image of the countries represented by the banknotes. For this work Meireles utilized the distribution of monetary notes, which permeates throughout society, to transmit political messages in the form of art, while also questioning authoritarian and capitalist societies as symbolized by their financial systems.