Group Exhibition | Acting on Dreams: The State of Immigrant Rights, Conditions, and Advocacy in the United States, Franklin Street Works, Stamford

June 9, 2015

“Acting on Dreams: The state of immigrant rights, conditions, and advocacy in the U.S.” is an original group exhibition curated by Yaelle S. Amir for Franklin Street Works. It will be on view from June 13 – August 30, 2015. Opening reception is Saturday, June 13 from 6:00 – 8:00 pm. With a VIP members preview from 5:00 – 6:00 pm.

Award Finalist | Carlos Motta is announced as finalist of the First LOOP Barcelona Discovery Award

May 24, 2015

The Discovery Award finalists are: Adrian Melis, Carlos Motta, Itziar Barrio, Joan Bennassar, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Marco Godoy, Rob Kennedy, Ryan Rivadeneyra, Shahar Marcus, Virgile Fraisse and YunTing Tsai, with the most voted video online

The Discovery Award has been created with the aim to support and recognize the recent production of videos and films by international artists through a free open call to the artistic community. This LOOP Barcelona initiative is supported by Estrella Damm, who sponsors this first edition of the prize, in line with its longtime support to the cultural sector. Furthermore, the exhibition featuring the finalist projects, included in the program of LOOP Barcelona 2015, will be hosted by Estrella Damm in its Antigua Fábrica (former beer factory) in Barcelona, giving the audience the opportunity to enjoy the works in an exhibitionformat.

With the aim of fostering a space for the promotion of video art works, the Discovery Award also creates an online video channel, in which selected works to the second stage of the competition will be available for viewing and voting.

The Discovery Award encourages artists to participate and the public to enjoy the best international artistic creation.

more info here

Film Premiere | New film “Deseos / رغبات” at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, May 14th at 7:30pm

May 6, 2015

Deseos / رغبات (Desires) exposes the ways in which medicine, law, religion, and cultural tradition shaped dominant discourses of the gendered and sexual body through the narration of two parallel stories. The first is that of Martina, who lived in Colombia during the late colonial period of the early 19th century. The second is the life of Nour, who lived in Beirut during the late Ottoman Empire. Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents an imaginary correspondence between these women. Separated by geography, culture, and religion they both faced the consequences of engaging in same sex relations and defying gender norms.

The colonial Court prosecuted Martina in 1803 for being a “hermaphrodite” after being accused by her female lover of having an “unnatural” body. Martina was tried in a court of law and ultimately set free after medical doctors appointed by the court were unable to find evidence of her lover’s accusation. This story is documented in the 1803 legal case found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá, Colombia. Meanwhile in Beirut, Nour married her female lover’s brother after her mother found them making love. Despite the fact that Nour’s story does not occur in a courtroom nor is it found in a legal case, notions of Islamic and late Ottoman laws, cultures, and histories condition her narrative.

Premiere
Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, May 14th at 7:30pm

more info here

Launch | Gender Talents at the New Museum, May 3, 2015

May 6, 2015

Join Carlos Motta to celebrate the launch of “Gender Talents,” a web-based project by Motta that engages movements and discourses for gender self-determination within trans and intersex communities internationally. The event will feature a screening of selected video portraits drawn from the project as well as a conversation with Motta, legendary author Kate Bornstein, intersex activist and sex therapist Tiger Devore, queer studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, artist Tara Mateik, and Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, New Museum.

“Gender Talents” features an online archive of video portraits of trans and intersex activists who thoughtfully perform gender as a personal, social, and political opportunity rather than as a social condemnation. Using in-depth interviews conducted with jogappa and trans communities in India, sex workers in Colombia and Guatemala, and intersex activists in the United States, “Gender Talents” documents the ways in which society conditions and regulates bodies and how gender activists build politics of resistance and action. Of specific concern is how individuals and organizations fight for state recognition, access to work and health benefits, and the right to self-determine their identities and self-govern their bodies, among other pressing issues.

“Gender Talents” is also an ongoing platform for physical events that reflect on alternative ways to think about the rigid nature of the gender binary as it is enforced in society.

more info here

Symposium | Art Social, Change and the Urban Sphere, CCNY, March 26, 2015

March 6, 2015

Symposium | VISIBLE/INVISIBLE, New Museum, March 7, 2015

March 5, 2015

This daylong symposium questions how the legacy of identity politics might be reconsidered in light of our present culture, where making oneself visible is de rigueur and yet can also carry threatening connotations: being captured, tracked, or dangerously overexposed. Through a series of discussions with artists and curators who are renegotiating the identity politics of earlier generations, “VISIBLE/INVISIBLE” examines how the underlying goals of movements that demanded representation (both in art and in culture at large) remain urgent and yet require significant rethinking amid a transformed social and existential landscape. Invited speakers will provocatively consider how power is mapped and at the same time hijacked in society today—not just between centers and margins, but also between subcultures and across shifting alliances. In addition, they will reflect on and present arguments for and against identity politics, attempting to consider its accomplishments while simultaneously restating, refuting, or reconfiguring its terms in the present.

more info here

Two person exhibition | Ornament, Simon Preston Gallery, New York, 22 February -22 March

February 19, 2015

Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present Ornament, an exhibition of works by Amie Siegel and Carlos Motta, which will open to the public on Sunday, 22 February and run until 22 March, 2015.

Assembling two distinct projects, the exhibition creates anthropological divisions that evoke historical uncertainties and question the westernizing institutional lens and the cameras that document them. Unfolding through the witness of objects, each of the works chronicle alternative historical lineages, exploring both gender and sexuality. Drawing upon André Malraux’s proposition in ‘Musée Imaginaire’ – ‘The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture’ that displaces the physical art object and the museum through the photographic image, alternative interpretations emerge.

more info here

Group Exhibition | Canibalia, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, February 6 -26

January 28, 2015

Canibalia is a research around the notion and figure of the cannibal. The exhibition will entail a visual exploration on the anthropophagic subject, from where to (un)think cannibalism and the cannibal as spaces of dissidence, desire, community, ecology and exchange.

With Theodor de Bry, Jeleton, Runo Lagomarsino, Candice Lin, Pablo Marte, Carlos Motta, Pedro Neves Marques, Manuel Segade, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané. Curated by Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga

Opening on February 6th, 2015 from 6 to 9pm. From February 6 to April, 26 2015

more info here

Solo Exhibition | Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, January 24- March 22, 2015

January 9, 2015

Röda Sten Konsthall is proud to open the 2015 season with a large survey exhibition of artist Carlos Motta.
2015.01.24 – 2015.03.22

more info here

Screening | Nefandus at SITAC XII, Saturday, January 24, 1:45pm

December 31, 2014

more info here