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Jun 052025
 

By Walter Marsh for The Guardian

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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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.

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“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.”

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

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“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.

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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(more info here)

Jun 032025
 

by RUBY SMUSKOWITZ for to Be Magazine

02 June 2025

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Known for his endurance work, the Cuban-born, New York-based performance artist Carlos Martiel uses his body as both a subject and material to confront issues of colonialism, racism, migration, and systemic violence. Ahead of his performances of Cuerpo and Custody at Dark Mofo this June, Martiel reflects on the physical toll of his work, the power of nudity, and how art can hold space for both personal truth and collective memory.

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RUBY SMUSKOWITZ Your work is described as endurance-based, with your body used as a site of political confrontation. How do you physically, emotionally and mentally prepare for such intensely charged performances?

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CARLOS MARTIEL I’ve been working as a visual artist for about two decades. The majority of my practice focuses on using performance as a weapon for social and political critique of the injustices I’ve experienced as an Afrodecendent, immigrant and diasporic queer body. I’ve focused on durational performances, and in many of these works, I’ve consciously pushed my physical and mental boundaries. Having worked this way for so many years, the first thing I must say as an artist is that I believe in what I do; otherwise, sustaining this type of work would be impossible for many years. I have some preparation rituals like physical exercises, breathing and concentration. However, I can’t always do them before a performance, and I still have to go on stage and put my body into it.

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(more info here)

May 142025
 

OPENING: Saturday, May 17, 2025 / 11.30 am – 7.00 pm

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Galleria Continua is marking 10 years in Cuba with an incredible exhibition featuring 41 Cuban artists, plus activities, events, performances, collaborations and surprises you won’t want to miss.

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Artists: Juan Carlos Alom, Balada Tropical, Abel Barroso, Alejandro Campins, Iván Capote, Yoan Capote, Laura Carralero, Yaima Carrazana, Celia & Yunior, Elizabet Cerviño, Gabriel Cisneros, Arlés del Río, Ariamna Contino, Raúl Cordero, Susana Pilar Delahante, Jenny Feal, Leandro Feal, Joaquín Ferrer, Diana Fonseca, René Francisco Carlos Garaicoa, Flavio Garciandía, Rocío García, Alejandro González, Osvaldo González, Álex Hernández, Orestes Hernández, Reynier Leyva Novo, Luis López Chávez, Carlos Martiel, Yornel Martínez, José Mesías, Yanelis Mora, Michel Pérez Pollo, Eduardo Ponjuán, Wilfredo Prieto, Ángel Ricardo Ríos, Lázaro Saavedra, José Yaque.

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(more info here)

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Galleria Continua | Rayo # 108 entre Zanja y Dragones, Barrio Chino, La Habana.

Apr 082025
 

CUSTODY (2025)
Performance by Carlos Martiel
Commissioned by Dark Mofo
Saturday June 14, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm

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(more info here)

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CITY HALL | 57-63 Macquarie St, Hobart Tasmania 7000, Australia.

Feb 162025
 

MAR 14, 2025 – JUL 27, 2025

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“Possessed.” “Deviant.” “Sick.” Historically, colonial regimes attempted, gained, and maintained control over cuir/kuir/queer, trans, Black, and Indigenous people by pathologizing them along with their relationships—to the land, to the nonhuman, to one another. The rich sexual and gender diversity of the many cultures of Abya Yala (Kuna for the entirety of the Americas ) was unintelligible to Western knowledge frameworks. To justify acts of violent dispossession and extraction, they characterized specific ways of existing as unnatural. These narratives have wound through legal, religious, cultural, political, and ideological structures in Abya Yala since 1492, and—as ficciones patógenas (pathogenic fictions)—they shape our understandings of bodies, land, culture, and power today.

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The artists in this exhibition explore how ficciones patógenas have been perpetuated and embodied, occluding local, non-Western, and Indigenous ways of being and knowing. In their 2018 book ficciones patógenas, Guaxu trans writer, activist, and participating artist Duen Neka’hen Sacchi traces their own medical history through Western regimes of bodily conformity. The wounding and suturing of Neka’hen’s body (and other nonconforming bodies), based on false notions of order and reproduction, echoes the violent reshaping of the “Indies,” which inextricably bound biology to nationhood. This impact is also traceable through technological, linguistic, territorial, and economic processes. Through hybrid practices that draw from Indigenous, colonial, and contemporary images and strategies, the artists propose ways in which land and bodies exist as sites of resistance and transformation.

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This exhibition is part of Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from la Conquista to the Present, a project of the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. Over the past three years, in eleven countries across the Americas, the project has sponsored exhibitions documenting over 500 years of territorial, embodied, and cultural heritage dispossession through mechanisms of deceit, disease, and warfare. The exhibitions have featured contemporary artworks that address indigeneity, extractivism, coloniality, racism, and gender and sexual dissidence. The organizers of ficciones patógenas, Stamatina Gregory and Georgie Sánchez, bring together only a small selection of the artists and artworks presented across this multitude of international exhibitions.

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Artists in the exhibition

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Carlos Arias, Felipe Baeza, Seba Calfuqueo, Javier Cardona Otero, Colectivo Ayllu (álex aguirre sánchez, iki yos piña narváez, kimy/leticia rojas miranda, lucrecia masson córdoba, francisco godoy vega), Mandorilyn Crawford, Gian Cruz, Frau Diamanda, Venuca Evanán, Camilo Godoy, Carlos Martiel, Lulu V. Molinares, Lizette Nin, Rio Paraná (Duen Neka’hen Sacchi, Mag de Santo), Duen Neka’hen Sacchi, Javi Vargas Sotomayor, Lucía Egaña Rojas and Ju Salgueiro, Luis Fernando Zapata

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(more info here)

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Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art | 26 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013

Feb 162025
 

This exhibition is in collaboration with A/POLITICAL

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From March 8 to June 15, 2025.
Official opening: March 7, 2025.

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A protest and celebration in one. It is a defiant celebration of the power of art to subvert our expectations, to inspire, heal, excite, confuse, disrupt and challenge. At the same time, it is an uncompromising protest against the glitz and glamour of an art market that reduces the value of art to mere finance.

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Curator Kendell Geers was persecuted as an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1980s and has lived in exile as a political refugee ever since. As a result, he has a direct understanding of the painful overlap between art and politics. Geers gained international recognition early on, participating in the Johannesburg Biennial in 1997 and Documenta 11 in 2002, among others.

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EVERYTHING IS TRUE – NOTHING IS PERMITTED, shows highly explosive work by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Alfredo Jaar, Alexander Brener, Andres Serrano, Andrei Molodkin, Arthur Jafa, Betty Tompkins, Bruce LaBruce, Carlos Martiel, Cassils, Cildo Meireles, Conor Scully, Dread Scott, Dunes Kiefer, Democracia, David Wojnarowicz / Andreas Sterzing, Edith Dekyndt, Éveline van den Driessche & Conor Scully, Franko B, Gino de Dominicis, Gilbert and George, Guy Debord, Gustav Metzger, Hollie Miller, Inna Shevchenko / FEMEN, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Johan Grimonprez, Joy Lavigne, Kara Walker, Kendell Geers, Kennardphillipps, Kubra Khademi, Lerato Shadi, Lynda Benglis, Made in Eric / Marcel Broodthaers, Mandy El-Sayegh, Maria Metsalu, María María Acha-Kutscher, Marina Abramović, Marinella Senatore, Martha Rosler, Mat Collishaw, Melanie Wiel / Merzedes Sturm-LieMerzedes Sturm-Lie, Michel François, Milica Tomic, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Nica Roses, Nika Neelova, Oleg Kulik, Petr Davydtchenko, Pyotr Pavlensky, Regina José Galindo, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí / Luis Buñuel, Santiago Sierra, Selma Selman, Sigalit Landau, Steven Cohen, Tracey Rose, Ulay and Valie Export

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(more info here)

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BRUTUS | Keileweg 10-18, 3029 BS Rotterdam, Países Bajos

Oct 192024
 

by Maximilíano Durón, Paula Mejía, Mauricio E. Ramírez, Alex Santana for ARTnews
October 15, 2024

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Though Latinx people have long been part of the fabric of this country, Latinx artists in the United States have only recently begun to be acknowledged by the mainstream art world. Because of the lack of support for their works, many Latinx artists established their own venues—from New York to Los Angeles, San Francisco to Chicago, Phoenix to San Antonio—to showcase the varied artistic visions of this diverse community. In recent years institutional support has become more forthcoming, thanks in large part to a generation of Latinx scholars, curators, and writers who have raised the profiles of their artistic elders and contemporaries. And while market support has been much slower in coming, that too is beginning to change.

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Below we examine 75 of the most important and exciting Latinx artists, who have had a profound impact on art history and their communities by creating work in which community members can see themselves represented. This list is by no means comprehensive but serves as entry point to learn about a diverse group of artists who deserve further study.

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Carlos Martiel was born in Havana in 1989 and lives and works in New York. At the core of his practice is his body, which he often subjects to durational performances that comment on the legacies of slavery and colonialism and the present-day realities of racism and migration. His works, whether seen in person or viewed via documentation, are difficult to watch though hard to look away from—and that is precisely Martiel’s point. In 2022 at the Steven Turner gallery in Los Angeles, Martiel appeared naked with a noose around his neck as he was held up by various people—many of them white—to prevent him from asphyxiating. The performance, Cuerpo, recalls the lynchings that were often public spectacles attended by large groups of white people as a form of entertainment. Here, those in attendance had to work to prevent Martiel’s death. For Condecoración Martiel, Carlos (2014), the artist underwent surgery to remove a 6-centimeter-circumference piece of skin, which was later placed by an art conservator into a gold medal that mimic a type of medal given by the Cuban government to select citizens. The area where the skin was removed was stitched together, with a tattoo commemorating what had been taken.

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In one performance in his ongoing “Monument” series, Martiel stood nude on a plinth at El Museo del Barrio for several hours covered in blood drawn from people who had been marginalized; in another he had his hands restrained behind his back by police handcuffs in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. “This work proposes a temporary monument to bodies that have historically been and continue to be discriminated, oppressed, and excluded by Eurocentric and patriarchal hegemonic discourses,” Martiel has written about the piece. —M.D.

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(more info here)

Oct 142024
 

By Katy Diamond Hamer for Artforum

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Cuban-born Carlos Martiel is known for his physically and psychologically challenging durational performances. The artist’s institutional solo debut at New York’s El Museo del Barrio, “Cuerpo” (Body), featured more than ten years of his work in video, drawing, sculpture, and photography. As the winner of the museum’s inaugural Maestro Dobel Latinx Art Prize in 2023, Martiel was awarded $50,000 to assist with the realization of this rich survey presentation.

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Blood is a carrier of disease and dis-ease; an essential life force that also produces great anxiety. For centuries, artists have utilized blood as a medium. Martiel confronts the pathology of human fear when this material is no longer inside the body, adopting it as a conceptual mirror for society. During El Museo’s “Estamos Bien—La Trienal 20/21” (We Are Fine—The Triennial 20/21), the artist staged an iteration of a piece—sans audience, owing to Covid-19 restrictions—from his performance series “Monumento” (Monument) 2021–. The work, titled Monumento I, was recorded and then played on a loop in a project space: It captures the artist covering much of his naked body in the blood of migrants and other marginalized people. It is a powerfully visceral statement on the racism and xenophobia that have a stranglehold on American culture and politics right now.

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Crucially, Martiel’s practice contends with the existential dilemmas of the Afro-Latinx experience. His painful, time-based undertakings echo the brutality of collective struggle. His actions, which are in dialogue with historical performance works of the 1960s and ’70s, are exercises in endurance and suffering that often result in real physical damage. Take South Body, 2019, in which Martiel gruesomely pierces his shoulder with a stake to which is attached a small American flag. In the roughly two-and-a-half-minute video Prodigal Son, 2010, the artist pins several of his father’s medals—awarded to him by the Cuban government for “patriotic merits,” according to the exhibition catalogue—to his own naked chest. In the show’s namesake video, Cuerpo, 2022, Martiel suspends a noose from a ceiling and loops it around his neck. A group of performers holds him up so that he does not end up hanging himself. Documenting an action originally staged at the Steve Turner gallery in Los Angeles, the video captures the precariousness and uncertainty of a potentially lethal moment, as well as the trust and strength we must demand of those around us in order to survive.

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The show also featured a reading room with books referencing other artists, such as Coco Fusco and Regina José Galindo, who have informed Martiel’s practice over the years. In an essay from a 2016 exhibition catalogue for the artist’s exhibition at Galleria Rossmutin Rome,“Vivere nel tuo corpo” (Living Inside Your Body), curator Diego Sileo writes, “Akin to Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera, Martiel likely believes that language and knowledge are at once freedom and oppression, in that they constitute the two most precious weapons of both the powerful and the oppressed.” Martiel is part of a long line of artists who have used their art to rail against broken social conventions, colonial rule, and systemic racism through life-threatening gestures. Like his forebears, Martiel uses violence against himself to reveal that the path to freedom is frequently unexpected, hard-won, and fraught.

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Sage, shaman, activist, survivalist: Martiel takes the trauma that is passed down for generations and turns it into something generative, healing, and, at certain points, even holy. Only thirty-five, the artist has already made his mark in the body-art canon—a mark that should remain permanently, like a scar.

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(more info here)

Sep 142024
 

Sep 142024
 

August 24 – October 5, 2024
Reception: Saturday, August 24th, 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm

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Verve gallery is opening ‘Posesión’, the first solo exhibition in Brazil by cuban artist Carlos Martiel. Opening on 24 August 2024, the show features new works produced especially for the Brazilian context, with a critical text by Ayrson Heráclito, an artist with whom he has collaborated numerous times and has had an intense exchange for many years.

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Based in New York, Martiel is one of today’s most prestigious performers and has already performed at important institutions such as the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York (USA); El Museo del Barrio, New York (USA), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Netherlands); The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (USA), among others. The winner of numerous awards, his works are also part of the permanent collections of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York (USA); The Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, USA); the Rio Art Museum (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, among others. At the moment, the a major retrospective exhibition at the Museo del Barrio, also in New York City, curated by the director of the institution’s director, Rodrigo Moura.

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In the works developed for this show, Martiel investigates the dynamics surrounding bodies, exploring issues of resistance and resilience in the different contexts of colonisation. As a result, the artist weaves connections with the Brazilian reality in different religiosity (such as Candomblé), symbols (flags and medals) and territory (demarcations and disputes). In very synthetic and powerful works, Martiel transforms his existence into a radical experience of art. In the critical text developed for the for the exhibition, Ayrson Heráclito defines the strength of his work precisely: ‘we can think of his artistic discourse as the dissonant voice of a black, queer, dispossessed and immigrant subject in constant conflict with the politics of subjection of his time. Presenting an archive of situations where racism, sexism, colonialism and utopianism intersect in the most vicious and sadistic violence, the artist produces an anti-racist and libertarian manifesto. The poetics of his work trigger in the audience an uncomfortable ethical and political scare,’ concludes the curator.

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(más info aquí)

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Verve Galeria | Edificio Louvre, Av. São Luís 192, República, São Paulo, Brasil.

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