The work of Aranda exists outside the limits of the object. His temporary installations and projects, which often examine social interactions and the role that the circulation of objects plays in the cycles of production and consumption, are intensely site-specific. e-flux Video Rental (2004–07), one of his best-known works, is a collaboration with artist and curator Anton Vidokle who created an archive of hundreds of artist videos available to the public for free; This traveling international project was enhanced by local artists and transformed by different tendencies and temperaments in each new city.
Similarly, his collaborative project with Vidokle and artist Liz Linden, Pawnshop (2007), transformed the New York e-flux store into a pawn shop where artworks submitted by artists were sold if they were not claimed within 30 days. This project comments on the complex relationship between artists and the commercial market, as well as the socioeconomic position of businesses in urban communities.
Time / Bank (2009–12), another collaboration with Vidokle under the e-flux banner, was an artist-minded online platform that treated time as currency. The project continued with even criticism of the capitalist art market as it moved into the virtual realm. His series Portable Graffiti (2006) is a study of the vagaries of context and the mutability of the text; spray painted sayings like “I’ve lost trust with everyone in the country right now“And, in a similar way, the political statements became ambiguous in the different spaces, countries and social situations in which the works were carried out.
In order to Intervals, a solo presentation of four works installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2009, Aranda he explored and inverted the notion of time as a strictly assigned linear designation marked by clocks and calendars. Each piece, like a clock that keeps time according to Aranda’s own heartbeat, captures the passage of time in an individualized sense. This concern with temporal politics was explored the previous year in You Had No Ninth of May! (2008), a series of installation pieces that conceptually and formally map the international date line in Kiribati, the South Pacific archipelago that changed its politically determined boundary, so that its territory was no longer divided between “today” and “tomorrow. “. Researching the officially allotted time as the subject of your work.
Aranda was an Artist in Residence at Iaspis, the International Artists Study Program in Stockholm (2007), as well as the International Residency at Recollets in Paris (2008).