Carlos Martiel

April 16–June 15, 2026 & May 1, 2026
EXHIBITION | SYMPOSIUM

As a critical engagement with contemporary Black queer visual art, Exposure examines the dynamic interplay between figuration and abstraction, highlighting the formal indeterminacy that shapes photography, film, sculpture, and new media. The exhibition interrogates ruptures within the conventions of contemporary art-historical discourse and methodology that circumvent narratives of transcendence and uplift. In the context of intensifying surveillance practices and anti-trans rhetoric, Exposure critically addresses themes of contamination, communicability, and consent, as they are refracted and unsettled through the intersecting lenses of Blackness and queerness in the field of the visual. By convening a chorus of Black queer artists from the Americas, Europe, and the African continent, the exhibition tends to the aesthetic leaps that amplify the urgency of contemporary Black diasporic art and erotic cultures.

Artist: Alanna Fields, keyon gaskin, Eric Gyamfi, Deborah-Joyce Holman, Nadia Huggins, Clifford Prince King, Carlos Martiel, Patric McCoy, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Shikeith, Texas Isaiah, Tourmaline, Ajamu X.

Curatorial team: Lindiwe Makgalemele, Jordan Mulkey, J.M. Nimocks, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Gee Wesley.

(more info here)

Cohen & Atrium Galleries,
Granoff Center for the Creative Arts | 154 Angell St, Providence, RI.

Viernes, 27 de marzo de 2026
2–2:45 pm

Acompañe al artista Carlos Martiel para explorar obras de la colección de arte africano del Museo, centrándose en piezas originarias de Camerún, el Congo y los pueblos bantúes del sur de África, mientras reflexiona sobre las prácticas coloniales y extractivistas históricas. A través de una charla y una visita guiada, estas piezas se contextualizan junto con obras del artista, como Continente y Muerte al olvido, promoviendo un diálogo crítico sobre los procesos de apropiación, violencia y memoria que afectan tanto a las comunidades africanas en el continente como a la diáspora africana en las Américas.

Acompañe a expertos del Museo, como curadores, conservadores, científicos y académicos, para profundizar en una selección de objetos exhibidos en las salas. Conozca nuevas perspectivas e historias nunca contadas por los expertos de The Met y observe más en detalle las obras de arte. Tendrá también la oportunidad de hacer preguntas.

Gratuito con la entrada al Museo. El precio del boleto queda a discreción del visitante residente del estado de Nueva York y es gratuito para los menores de 12 años acompañados de un adulto y para el cuidador acompañante de un visitante con discapacidad.

(mas info aquí)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art | 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, NY 10028

Introducing the CIRCA PRIZE 2025 finalists! Throughout September, thirty artists from across the world transform public space into a site of reflection and gathering. Each evening at 20:25 local time, a new work will appear on the Piccadilly Lights in London and on the Limes Kurfürstendamm screen in Berlin. Audiences everywhere can watch online and take part in the Public Vote below.

This year’s prize awards a total of £40,000 to support the next generation of creative visionaries. A jury made up of Björk, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Edward Enninful, Michèle Lamy, Ebony L. Haynes, Alvaro Barrington, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Josef O’Connor, Norman Rosenthal and Catherine Wood will select one artist to receive £30,000 and realise a major new public commission premiering in 2027. A further £10,000 Public Vote Prize, powered by Piccadilly Lights, will go to the artist chosen by audiences worldwide.

From more than one thousand applications across twenty-five countries including Brazil, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, thirty finalists have been selected with the Curators’ Circle made up of Amal Khalaf, Ben Broome and Samantha Ozer. As Broome notes, “making moving image art in 2025 is no easy task and opportunities to have work funded at the level that CIRCA provides are few and far between.” Each finalist presents a work in response to the CIRCA 2025 manifesto REFUGIA, which imagines sanctuaries of care and survival and draws on ecological refuges where life endured through catastrophic climates.

The thirty finalists form what CIRCA Founder and Artistic Director Josef O’Connor describes as “a constellation of urgent voices”. Together they speak across migration, ecology, queer resistance, ritual and memory.

Martiel’s work is characterized as endurance art. His artistic practice uses his own body to draw attention to the embodied experience of Blackness under systems of violence and exploitation worldwide. In his performances, Martiel frequently put himself into challenging situations like piercing his skin with a miniature flagpole flying an American flag, having a pest exterminator spray his body with insecticide, or having a piece of his skin surgically removed and preserved in a gold medal. Thematically, his works explore racism, gender, immigration, and the legacy of European colonialism in the USA.

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
As human beings, we act like angels of death, destroying ancestral knowledge, ecological niches, and extinguishing species, and also perpetuating poverty, discrimination, and genocide around the world. We have been tyrannized in the name of a global economy that benefits only a handful of people whose purpose in life is to spill rivers of blood, turn existence into a valley of tears, and transform natural paradises into arid deserts. Most current Rulers must be removed from political positions and stripped of their power to see if we can survive as a species before it is too late.

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
For the new commission, I will create a video performance titled “Poder Absoluto”, which explores the relationship between body, objectification, and process. This piece constitutes a critical response from the resistance to the challenging times we are all living in around the world under autocratic, militarized, and despotic governments. This video performance includes the participants of immigrants, people of African descent, Latinos, Women, Muslims, members of the LGBTQIA community, and First Nations, among others. Bodies that are considered minorities and historically marginalized and oppressed in the United States and Europe.

Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!

(more info here)

By Walter Marsh for The Guardian

The Afro-Latinx artist pushes his body to the extreme in performances taking on racism, colonialism and police brutality. He’s heading to Tasmania’s Dark Mofo festival to be buried in sand.

In 2022 in a Los Angeles gallery, Carlos Martiel placed a noose around his neck and suspended his nude body from a rope tied to the ceiling. The piece was titled Cuerpo, Spanish for “body”, and the photographs and footage alone are shocking, mournful and distressing, as volunteers take turns holding his body aloft to prevent the real risk of asphyxiation.

In conceiving the work, the Cuba-born, New York-based Afro-Latinx artist viewed hundreds of photographs of public lynchings from across the US – a brutal history of normalised extrajudicial violence that has moved artists from Billie Holiday to film-maker Steve McQueen. Those lynchings were also a kind of public performance: of terror, dehumanisation and white supremacy.

“I couldn’t put into words everything I thought and felt during the development of the work; it was a very profound and intense experience for me,” Martiel says, over email. “When I was finally taken down and went into the gallery director’s office to rest, I cried inconsolably for about 20 minutes. That had never happened to me before.”

In June, Martiel will present the video of his Cuerpo performance at Dark Mofo festival in lutruwita/Tasmania. He’ll also premiere a new live performance titled Custody, which reflects on “police brutality, incarceration, and death of racialised bodies” globally, including within First Nations communities in Australia. For two hours, Martiel will stand naked and restrained in a large hourglass structure in Hobart’s City Hall, as sand rises to subsume and compress his body.

For many years, Martiel’s flesh and blood has been his means of expression. For 2009’s Marea, he was buried up to his neck on a Havana beach as he waited for the tide to rise; in 2010’s Espíritus acuartelados, he struggled to free himself from under the combat-booted foot of another performer. For 2017’s Continente, he had nine small diamonds embedded in his skin and then lay in a New York gallery while a white man cut them out.

While many of his works are documented in photography and video, he believes that there are some things that can only be expressed through live performance, that the empathetic nature of performance unlocks something between audience and artist that a sculpture or painting can’t.

The content of his work, he says, is informed by “the contradictions and nonconformities that living in the Cuban context generated in me”.

Born in Havana in 1989, in a time of economic crisis and social upheaval at the tail end of the cold war, Martiel witnessed the intersecting realities of race, inequality, homophobia and government repression from a young age. “Ideas become clear for anyone under that breeding ground,” he says.

Art became “an escape route, a refuge, a firearm, and a means to express myself freely in that scenario”.

Martiel developed his particular brand of art while studying goldsmithing at Havana’s Academy of Fine Arts, when he started making drawings using a dilution of blood, iron oxide, vinegar and charcoal.

“Clandestinely, I had to go to public clinics and ask the nurses to take my blood to use it as paint later,” he says. “At first, they helped me in the process, but given how often I went, they stopped doing it, which frustrated me.”

He cut out the intermediary, and started exposing his body to physical and psychological extremes, influenced by Cuban and Cuban American artists such as Tania Bruguera and Coco Fusco, as well as Marina Abramović, Regina Galindo, Paulo Nazareth and Ayrson Heráclito.

Initially, lacking money or access to Havana’s conventional art spaces, Martiel started out by mounting public performances and interventions. But as his profile grew, he was invited into some of the art world’s most prestigious spaces. In 2021, as part of his Monument series, he stood naked with his hands cuffed behind his back in the middle of the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic white rotunda.

While his body of work is steeped in the context of his home country of Cuba and his adopted home of the US, the questions he addresses are, sadly, transnational.

“In all the places I’ve visited, I always find a colonial past conditioning the present, where the same bodies are oppressed,” he says. “I’m referring to the less fortunate human groups who have been and continue to be the victims of capitalism, colonialism, fascism, and racism.”

In conceiving his new performance for Dark Mofo, he was mindful of Australia’s “necropolitics” and history of violence. While developing Custody, Martiel was in touch with Caleb Nichols-Mansell, a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist and cultural adviser for Dark Mofo, who he says “shared a lot of information with me about the story and specifically about the situation First Nations people face there regarding deaths in police custody. That conversation greatly influenced how I approached the issue.”

While Martiel’s work is often confronting, he isn’t driven by shock value or merely replicating the trauma and subjection inflicted on marginalised bodies.

“The topics I address are painful … but I never fall into the aesthetics of shock or gratuitous pain,” he says. “The elegance of visual language and the transmission of knowledge through art have always been vital to me.”

And while many of his works have referenced past and historical traumas, his work is as much a response to the present.

“It’s sad to look back on the past, but even more heartbreaking to observe the present and see everything we’re witnessing daily,” he says, invoking Trump’s America, Ukraine and Palestine.

“If this isn’t colonialism at its finest, I don’t know what is. Every day, I believe less in justice; all I have left is the consolation of poetic justice, which I allow myself to profess through art, my main avenue of expression, struggle, and resistance.”

For Martiel, it means his experience in that Los Angeles gallery in 2022 has only deepened in meaning.

“With all that we see daily in the world, I think it encompasses many more meanings than I felt at its execution. Maybe it is wrong for me to say it, but I think it makes more sense every day that passes.”

(more info here)