photos by Roberto Ruíz
The power of “difference as a way of being in the world” permeates the over twenty-five years of transdisciplinary work by Carlos Motta (Bogota, 1978). Putting into play critical and aesthetic devices to reimagine the horizons of desire, the artist’s affirmation of difference as a political position unfolds throughout the exhibition, Pleas of Resistance traverses Pre-Hispanic homoeroticism, the politics of care as queer emancipation, acts if self-determination beyond the human, as well as storytelling around silenced stories as a mode of knowledge sharing, mutual sustenance and rebellion. Staged in four intersectional chapters, the exhibition combines early photographic self-portraits from the 1990s with more recent video performances and installations. In these works, the artist unleashes counter-narrative devices that challenge the normalizing institutional discourses of religion, medicine and the law, through the exploration of disobedient identities or deviant or sick bodies as a field of knowledge and power.
Motta often engages in artistic collaborations to create spaced for queer liberation, a practice that ultimately aims to move beyond the violent constraints of categorization. Firmly committed to communities of marginalized identities and their ongoing struggles against the violence of erasure and epistemicide, Motta’s work enacts the conviction that queer justice is social justice. In Pleas of Resistance, the artistic practice of Carlos Motta materializes acts of faith deviance, love and transgression that together insist upon the potential for social transformation. Though fabulation and performative rewritings of history, Motta consistently erodes official narratives in a poetic journey that is always blasphemous, bodily and political.
Queering Colonial Histories
Carlos Motta delves into colonial history and the instrumentalization of Christianity as an ideological tool for the oppression of dissident sexualities and genders. Through various works – a trilogy of film essays, photographs, objects and a museum – this space explores the Spanish and Portuguese conquest’s imposition of exclusionary epistemologies on pre-Hispanic bodies. Motta engages in performative acts of rewriting forcefully erased, forgotten, and outlawed homoerotic stories. These acts of ‘inversion’ re-narrate and critically question Western norms, evidencing not only the concealment and silencing of homosexuality in pre-Hispanic cultures, but also revealing latent sexual tensions and contradictions within the Catholic doctrine. The artist features his own ‘inverted’ queer body in a video-performance of self-affirmation, connecting to the legacy of enforced repression of desires and sexualities condemned to the margins of religion.
Since his early works from the late 1990s, Carlos Motta has navigated the personal and political realities of being a Colombian artist residing in the United States – addressing the contemporary experience of being a migrant in a country that has consistently exercised oppression and brute force over those living within and beyond its borders, to exert its political and military hegemony over much of the globe, particularly in Latin America.
