Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have been selected by the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions — a group of arts professionals organized by the National Endowment for the Arts to advise the State Department — to represent the United States at the next edition of the Venice Biennale in 2011, reports Carol Vogel of the New York Times.

Since 1995 the Puerto Rico-based duo have been working together to create a body of work that explores relationships among art, politics and international identity through performance, sculpture, photography, sound and video.

Allora and Calzadilla are the first collaborative, rather than a single artist, to represent the US in Venice. The commissioner of the duo’s performance and installation inside the US pavilion will be Lisa Freiman, chairman of the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s contemporary art department. The Indianapolis institution was selected to be the commissioning institution of the pavilion.

A production still from 2007 of Allora & Calzadilla on PBS’s "Art in the Twenty-First Century". Season 4. Episode: Paradox.