Exhibition ‘Carlos Motta. Pleas of Resistance’

The exhibition Pleas of Resistance spans over 25 years of the practice of the artist Carlos Motta (Bogotá, 1978), consistently shaped by the body and sexual dissidence as a space for artistic experimentation and political resistance. It includes both his first explorations in photographic self-portraits and his more recent performances and video installations. The show inquires into the density of Motta's artistic inquiry, which is characterised by implacable rigour with archives and by questioning its violences, silencings and desires. Motta's work counters the imposition of eurocentric epistemologies, from the conquest and colonial period in the Americas to their propagations in the present time, bearing in mind the legacy of religion as a perpetrating and troubling vehicle of colonialism. 

Motta's artistic career began when he was very young, in the late 1990s, shortly before he emigrated and moved to New York. The show pays special attention to the artist's commitment to political histories and social movements – and more specifically with the politics of sexuality and gender, as well as the HIV or AIDS crisis – and their contemporary offshoots on the fragility of bodies. The notion of the collective body and the artist's attention to the politics of care are fundamental in representation, either individual or self-representation, and in different forms of collaboration that the artist has stipulated in his projects over the years. 

Motta's works suggest alternative stories to the hegemonic narratives of history, religion and democracy. His work and artistic collaborations materialise the potential of social rectification by rewriting history, and they erode the official narratives of colonial history, military dictatorships and neofascism and their violences in a pilgrimage that is always blasphemous, corporal and political. 

*Entrance is paid except on the 24th during the Festes de la Mercè.