_{Director of Photography and Camera Operator – Flora Dias
Camera Operator B – Mirrah da Silva
Sound capture, soundtrack, mix and master – Luisa Lemgruber
Performers/Artists – Alessandro Aguipe, Ana Musidora, Flow Kountouriotis, Karen Marçal, Mariana Taques, Tadzio Veiga, Vitor Martins Dias, Vulcanica Pokaropa
Production – Felipe Melo Franco
Studio – Zanella Creative Studio
Post-production – Angela Herr
Additional post-production – João Marcos de Almeida
Graphic design – Lauryn Siegel}

In his second solo exhibition at Vermelho, Carlos Motta occupies the gallery’s facade with one of his Gravidade drawings, a two-part project consisting of a fragmented graphite drawing and a 14-minute video, commissioned by Vermelho and produced in São Paulo. The drawing depicts humans urgently caring for one another. The figures hold, carry, and drag each other carefully, visibly struggling with the weight of the bodies, yet determined to help one another persist in the midst of a barren desert where only a few patches of green grass suggest the hope of survival.

Beloved Martina is a series of 10, 3D sandstone prints that depict the mythological figure of the “hermaphrodite,” based on sculptures from Greek and Roman antiquity, the Renaissance, and photographs from the late nineteenth century. Exhibited in a formal, museum-like installation, the sculptures confront the institutional drive to categorize and define with its authoritative gaze. The work reflects on the restrictive nature of the gender binary and its own mythologizing forces, and points to the historical and ongoing repression of intersex identities.

The Fall of the Damned, Motta’s ongoing series of graphite drawings, explores the idea of mass-infection through the visual metaphor of the swarm. Featuring dense tangles of snakes, birds, hyenas, and humans, these works allegorize dehumanization as a social consequence of sickness and disease. These violent and erotic drawings are informed by art historical depictions of hell as well as human barbarism, commenting on inhuman tendencies across many cultures to stigmatize illness by conflating heath and morality.

The Fall of the Damned, Motta’s ongoing series of graphite drawings, explores the idea of mass-infection through the visual metaphor of the swarm. Featuring dense tangles of snakes, birds, hyenas, and humans, these works allegorize dehumanization as a social consequence of sickness and disease. These violent and erotic drawings are informed by art historical depictions of hell as well as human barbarism, commenting on inhuman tendencies across many cultures to stigmatize illness by conflating heath and morality.

Part of a long-term documentary project by interdisciplinary artist Carlos Motta— in collaboration with artists Heldáy de la Cruz, Julio Salgado, and Edna Vázquez– We Got Each Other’s Back is a three-part, multi-channel video installation featuring portraits of queer artists and activists in the United States who are or have been openly undocumented, and who are producing work to denounce historic and present-day broken US immigration policies. The project demonstrates how the intersections of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, and economic background define the environment of marginalization and discrimination to which immigrants are subjected, while challenging mainstream media narratives of immigration and sexuality by presenting nuanced, real-life stories of living at the margins of the legal system. We Got Each Other’s Back also includes live and online events and public programs that engage the challenges faced by undocumented migrants. The first chapter, titled Narrative Shifter: A Portrait of Julio Salgado, is a collaboration with Los Angeles-based artivist Julio Salgado, creator of the “Undocuqueer” project. Narrative Shifter was included in the exhibition Soft Power at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 2019 - March 2020), curated by Eungie Joo, in conjunction with a two-day international conference, Bodies at the Borders in January 2020 at SFMoMA and the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), co-organized by Carlos Motta and Rachel Nelson. The second and third chapters of We Got Each Other’s Back, titled Heldáy de la Cruz: Desierto a desierto (Desert to Desert) and Edna Vázquez: Si se puede (Yes You Can), were produced in Portland, Oregon in summer 2020 in close collaboration with artist and activist Heldáy de la Cruz and singer/songwriter Edna Vázquez. All three chapters were presented at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Portland, Oregon from November 7, 2020 to February 14, 2021, including an international, interdisciplinary online symposium in the exhibition’s closing weekend that will engage themes and questions central to the project. This exhibition was co-curated by Roya Amirsoleymani, PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Public Engagement, and Kristan Kennedy, PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art

WE THE ENEMY (2019) is a series comprised of 41 bronze sculptures based on representations of the devil drawn from art history: paintings that portray Satan in hell, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures that represent evil embodied.

Each figure defies normative moral standards of beauty, respectability, and behavior. Among this army of demons, there are characters who suggest sexual perversion – as typified by traditional catholic imagery.

Motta’s multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation.

As a historian of untold narratives and an archivist of repressed histories, Motta is committed to in-depth research on the struggles of post-colonial subjects and societies.

The complete set of WE THE ENEMY is now on view in Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols, Motta’s survey exhibition on view at The Wexner Center for the Arts.

Carlos Motta’s largest exhibition in the US to date celebrates the Colombian-born, New York–based artist’s commitment to radical difference and the debut of his Wex-commissioned project.

This video piece presents a 30-minute endurance performance made by Carlos Motta for the camera. Legacy shows the artist looking straight at the camera as he wears a dental gag and tries to read out a timeline of HIV/AIDS, from 1908 to 2019, dictated to him by American radio broadcaster Ari Shapiro. Unable to speak clearly, struggling to remember the lines and in pain, the artist gradually and visibly exhausts himself.

_{directed and performed by: Carlos Motta
research: Ted Kerr, Carlos Motta
voice over: Ari Shapiro
camera: Tyler Haft
drawing: Luca Cruz Salvati, Carlos Motta}

“Carlos Motta: Corpo Fechado is a multi-disciplinary exhibition by Colombian-born, New York-based artist Carlos Motta. For this project, which took almost two years to prepare, Carlos Motta carried out an extensive investigation of different documents and sources—including legal processes of the Inquisition—in Portuguese institutions, archives, and museum collections, in an attempt, to create alternative narratives to official History/ historiography. By focussing on marginalized communities and identities, Carlos Motta’s work establishes relationships between stories of queer culture and activism and mainstream historical accounts, to insist that the politics of sex and gender represent an opportunity to form critical positions against social injustice. In Corpo Fechado, Carlos Motta addresses the issues of colonialism in Latin America he has been working on since his Nefandus Trilogy (2013), emphasising the need to form an intersectional queer historical perspective.”

– text by Denise Ferreira da Silva about the exhibition

The diptych of portraits of José Francisco Pedroso (2019) – an African enslaved man who, along with José Francisco Pereira, crafted and distributed bolsas de mandinga – is part of the series of contextual works to Corpo Fechado: The Devil’s Work. Carlos Motta collaborated with Portuguese-Guinean actor Welket Bungué to create this portrait, where Bungué’s wears a bolsa de mandiga offered to him by his own mother.

SPIT! (Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!) is a collective formed in 2017 by Carlos Motta, writer John Arthur Peetz, and artist Carlos Maria Romero. SPIT! wrote a series of queer manifestos that were initially performed at Frieze projects, London.

In Untitled Self-Portrait #3, is a photograph where Motta depicts himself simultaneously mournful and resolute, showing a clenched resilient fist, and resting his wistful head on a mirrored surface. As Jack McGrath warns: “Sometimes to gaze into a mirror is to see the malefactors of history leering back out, and real progress requires the courage to criticize even oneself.”

The Crossing presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands. Their touching accounts demonstrate the challenges of living amid homophobia and transphobia, in cultures where repression and discrimination make the open expression of non-normative genders and sexualities practically impossible. The exclusion, intimidation and abuse experienced by these refugees also took place during their asylum seeking processes in Dutch refugee camps, where they were humiliated and bullied by other refugees and often failed to obtain the protection they sought from Dutch authorities. The Crossing’s subjects hail from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Pakistan. Directly addressing the camera in confessional style, they discuss their personal histories of persecution, their perilous sea and land crossings, and their encounters with Dutch refugee policies. The refugee’s narratives are defined by their need to escape war and political and social oppression, and particularly to escape the common and deep-rooted discrimination LGBTQ people continue to face throughout the world. Carlos Motta selected the interviewees with the help of the Amsterdam organization Secret Garden, which campaigns to improve the life of LGBTQI refugees, supports their asylum applications, and helps them find their way in the Netherlands. The artist first met a larger group of refugees in Amsterdam in August 2016, and recorded the interviews with eleven refugees in an Amsterdam film studio in February 2017. In addition to the eleven videos, The Crossing presents around twenty historic objects from the collections of the Rijksmuseum, Tropenmuseum and Amsterdam Museum. Presented in two large glass cabinets, these etches, photos, porcelains, souvenir sculptures, and other objects observe the exile of diverse groups to the Netherlands, including Protestants in the 18th century and the exodus from Belgium in 1914. The objects in the display cases also refer to the Netherlands colonial past and its link with colonized peoples whose cultural identities and social positions were shaped by Dutch dominance and the dilution of local customs by Dutch traditions. In this way, Motta weaves together contemporary and historic histories of flight and forced migration, where the Netherlands is perceived as a humanist state that breeds hospitality, a welcoming refugee policy, and social and cultural tolerance through the framework of international human rights. The Crossing makes evident how this image of a hospitable nation is an ideological construct that is under attack by populist political movements that erode liberal European ideals.

This video presents an interview with Paulo Pascoal, the actor who plays José Francisco Pereira in Corpo Fechado: The Devils Work. Pascoal is a well-known actor in his home country of Angola, who after coming out as a gay during a TEDxLuanda talk, endured death threats, which lead him to migrate to Portugal. In Lisbon, where he currently resides, Pascoal finds himself trapped in a sort of immigration limbo, unable to re-enter Portugal should he ever leave. As Jack McGrath wrote, “the biography of the actor therefore resonates with the life of his character, mutatis mutandis, crisscrossing oceans of both water and time in spectral fulfillment of Benjamin’s historical method”.

Commissioned by the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia and first presented at the Claustro de San Agustín in Bogotá, Lágrimas is a musical and visual essay that uses tears as a metaphor for difference and social inequity and documents images of objects of three collections that present medical pathologies and anatomical deformities: The waxes from the Museo de Medicina of the Universidad Nacional, a collection of pre-Colombian figures and a series of photographs from the Museo de Historia de la Medicina Ricardo Rueda González of the Academia Nacional de Medicina in Bogotá, and some objects from doctor and anthropologist Hugo Sotomayor’s personal collection. The video reflects on the way in which “different” bodies have been represented and discussed throughout medical history. Lágrimas approaches what has been categorized as sick, pathological, rare and different, and consequently has been relegated to the margins of “normality.” The video is accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by musician Ian Tuner and it’s based on “LACHRIMAE” (1604) by John Dowland, a composition that reflects on different types of tears from a social and cultural perspective. Lágrimas is accompanied by a publication edited by Popolet Editions, distributed free of charge, with a selection of images and an interview between Carlos Motta and Hugo Sotomayor that serves as a living room guide and expands the historical and cultural significance of the objects.

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Requiem
Between October 2016 and February 2017, Carlos Motta presented the Requiem project at MALBA, under commission from the Argentinian museum. Requiem investigates the tense historical relationship between religion and divergent sexualities through a series of works that propose alternative visions to the moral values promoted by Christian doctrine. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the three-channel video installation entitled Requiem, which explores the narrative of liberation and transcendence attributed to the death and resurrection of Christ from a sexual re-reading of these stories. For this, Motta retakes the thoughts of the Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid and her Indecent Theology (2000). In the three videos, based on performative acts, the transcendent body is sexualized, “cured”, politicized and poetized, in search of new fictions that consider sexual differences.
Motta wonders: what would happen if we imagined an inclusive future for all, a future achieved by taking the paths that have always been presented as “impossible”? What would be the influence of a true reform of Catholic doctrine: a reform that considered the lives of people traditionally excluded because of their sexual orientation? What if the reform is the abolition of the institution? Is not it an impossible future, a desirable future? Through speculation and fiction, the exhibition proposes a clear look at the present and the great influence that the Church exerts on society.

Carlos Motta, along bondage artists Stefano Laforgia and Andrea Ropes, perform an inversion inside a 16th century chapel, an action that references Caravaggio’s “Crucifixion of Saint Peter” from 1600.

Queer and feminist theologian Linn Tonstad delivers a poignant critique of religious narratives referencing “Indecent Theology,” the work of Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid.

Italian performer Ernesto Tomasini performs “Libera Me” from Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem”

Beloved Martina is a series of ten small-scale sandstone 3D-printed sculptures modeled on Greco-Roman, 16th and 17th century statues of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, whose body merged with that of the water nymph Salmacis into an androgynous form. Two of the sculptures are modeled on late 19th and early 20th century black and white photographs and one by French photographer Nadar. The sculptures are of the enduring historical fascination with the intersex figure and the ways in which intersex bodies have been subject to the classifying gaze.

Produced with funds from the Future Generation Art Prize, Patriots, Citizens, Lovers… (2015) was developed in conversation with Ukrainian journalist Maxim Ivanukha and is composed of ten urgent interviews with Ukrainian LGBTI and queer activists who discuss the critical and dire situation of lesbian, gay, trans and intersex lives in Ukraine in times of war.
Confronted with innumerable challenges, Ukrainian LGBTI citizens are vulnerable targets of a violent homophobic rhetoric and remain largely under-recognized by a government that deems sexual and gender issues minor in light of the serious Ukrainian economic and political crisis.
Patriots, Citizens, Lovers… features testimonies by Alexander Zinchenkov, Anonymous, Anatoliy Yerema, Maxim Eristavi, Nina Verbytskaya, Olena Shevchenko, Oksana, Yuriy Frank, Yuri Yoursky and Zoryan Kis and Tymur Levchuk. These eleven courageous Ukrainians relentless activism greatly contributes to the formation of a new and democratic post-Revolution of Dignity Ukraine.

Produced with funds from the Future Generation Art Prize, Patriots, Citizens, Lovers… (2015) was developed in conversation with Ukrainian journalist Maxim Ivanukha and is composed of ten urgent interviews with Ukrainian LGBTI and queer activists who discuss the critical and dire situation of lesbian, gay, trans and intersex lives in Ukraine in times of war.
Confronted with innumerable challenges, Ukrainian LGBTI citizens are vulnerable targets of a violent homophobic rhetoric and remain largely under-recognized by a government that deems sexual and gender issues minor in light of the serious Ukrainian economic and political crisis.
Patriots, Citizens, Lovers… features testimonies by Alexander Zinchenkov, Anonymous, Anatoliy Yerema, Maxim Eristavi, Nina Verbytskaya, Olena Shevchenko, Oksana, Yuriy Frank, Yuri Yoursky and Zoryan Kis and Tymur Levchuk. These eleven courageous Ukrainians relentless activism greatly contributes to the formation of a new and democratic post-Revolution of Dignity Ukraine.

La puissance et la jouissance is a room-size installation composed of twenty miniature letterpress printed drawings installed behind the walls and made visible only by looking through with magnifying lenses. The drawings are based on a variety of historical images that depict unconventional sexual practices such as scenes of bestiality, hard gay sex practices, representations of female sexuality, Roman mythological figures engaged in sex, and religious iconography that has been appropriated by gay culture. The piece invites the viewer to experience the ways in which certain desires were historically constructed as unnatural and consequently rendered marginal and invisible. Désirs The piece’s title references Copi’s cartoon La puissance ou la jouissance made for the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire’s Rapport contre la normalité from 1971.

Deseos [Desires], 2015, exposes the ways in which medicine, law and religion shaped discourses of the gendered body through the narration of two stories: Martina’s, who lived in Colombia in the 19th century and was prosecuted for being a hermaphrodite, and Nour’s, who lived in Beirut during the Ottoman Empire and was forced to marry to her female lover’s brother.
Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents a correspondence between two women who faced the consequences of engaging in same sex relations and defying gender norms.
The screenplay for Deseos was written by Carlos Motta and Maya Mikdashi.
Deseos was commissioned by Council (Paris), premiered at the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art in September 2015 and has since screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam and other festivals.

Based on a Quimbaya culture illustration

Based on an undocumented chronicle about a pre-Hispanic indigenous culture from Colombia

In 2013, Carlos Motta presented the Nefandus project, featuring a series of works that explored the imposition of European epistemological categories onto native cultures during the Spanish and Portuguese Conquest of the Americas.
The project includes photographs, sculptures and a video, all of which addressing subjects that were deemed “exotic,” “wild,” or “native”.
The works defied these concepts and asked for alternative narratives to colonial history.

In 2013, Carlos Motta presented the Nefandus project, featuring a series of works that explored the imposition of European epistemological categories onto native cultures during the Spanish and Portuguese Conquest of the Americas.
The project includes photographs, sculptures and a video, all of which addressing subjects that were deemed “exotic,” “wild,” or “native”.
The works defied these concepts and asked for alternative narratives to colonial history.

Taxonomy of the Wild presents forty photographs of decaying murals that depict “wild” animals. The photos were shot in Bangalore, India. Within the larger context of the project Nefandus, these photographs attempt to illustrate the construction of the colonial category of the wild, which like sexuality, was imported by European settlers.

Taxonomy of the Wild presents forty photographs of decaying murals that depict “wild” animals. The photos were shot in Bangalore, India. Within the larger context of the project Nefandus, these photographs attempt to illustrate the construction of the colonial category of the wild, which like sexuality, was imported by European settlers.

A miniature replica of Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria. The only one of his three ships that didn’t return to Europe after the Conquest because it collapsed near the Island of Hispaniola.

Drawing based on the photograph Lou, N.Y.C in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio (1978)

[Towards a Homoerotic Historiography features] 20 miniature gold-washed silver figures, all copies of sculptures created by indigenous groups in the Americas before the conquest. Displayed in museum-like vitrines, the pieces depict acts of homoerotic sex. The installation reflects on the ongoing censorship these objects have been subjected to by the social sciences and encourages a removal of the Christian values that have been imposed on them in order to reconsider of the role the body, desire, and pleasure may have played in ancient cultures.

Deviations to Love is a series of 7 prints and digital projections that depict physical encounters between individuals and groups. Holding hands, raised fists held together, several hands grasping each other, a kiss and entangled bodies represent queer forms of affection.
These images were conceived as the set for “Gender Talents: A Special Address” a symposium convened and designed by Carlos Motta, which was held at Tate Modern’s The Tanks on February 2, 2013. The images were projected all around the Tank creating a set and environment for the sessions that asked what is at stake when abandoning or collapsing the gender binary in favor of a more generous understanding of gender and sexuality.

Deviations to Love is a series of 7 prints and digital projections that depict physical encounters between individuals and groups. Holding hands, raised fists held together, several hands grasping each other, a kiss and entangled bodies represent queer forms of affection.
These images were conceived as the set for “Gender Talents: A Special Address” a symposium convened and designed by Carlos Motta, which was held at Tate Modern’s The Tanks on February 2, 2013. The images were projected all around the Tank creating a set and environment for the sessions that asked what is at stake when abandoning or collapsing the gender binary in favor of a more generous understanding of gender and sexuality.

Deviations to Love is a series of 7 prints and digital projections that depict physical encounters between individuals and groups. Holding hands, raised fists held together, several hands grasping each other, a kiss and entangled bodies represent queer forms of affection.
These images were conceived as the set for “Gender Talents: A Special Address” a symposium convened and designed by Carlos Motta, which was held at Tate Modern’s The Tanks on February 2, 2013. The images were projected all around the Tank creating a set and environment for the sessions that asked what is at stake when abandoning or collapsing the gender binary in favor of a more generous understanding of gender and sexuality.

Deviations to Love is a series of 7 prints and digital projections that depict physical encounters between individuals and groups. Holding hands, raised fists held together, several hands grasping each other, a kiss and entangled bodies represent queer forms of affection.
These images were conceived as the set for “Gender Talents: A Special Address” a symposium convened and designed by Carlos Motta, which was held at Tate Modern’s The Tanks on February 2, 2013. The images were projected all around the Tank creating a set and environment for the sessions that asked what is at stake when abandoning or collapsing the gender binary in favor of a more generous understanding of gender and sexuality.

Who Feel Differently is a database documentary that addresses critical issues of contemporary queer culture.

Interviews features conversations with fifty queer academicians, activists, artists, radicals, researchers, and others in Colombia, Norway, South Korea and the United States about the histories and development of LGBTIQQ politics in those countries.

Themes outlines five thematic threads drawn from the interviews in the form of a narrative.This section has also been produced as a book.

Journal is a sporadic publication that presents in depth analyses and critiques of LGBTIQQ politics from queer perspectives.The first issue is “Queerly Yours: Thoughts and Afterthoughts on Marriage Equality.”

Ephemera presents documentation of temporary physical exhibitions and events held in different cities- social platforms to discuss queer politics locally.