Carlos Martiel

By Melina Paris for RANDOM LENGTHS NEWS

This past Saturday, the Cuban-born, New York-based artist, Carlos Martiel, stood unclothed, alone in a dark room. A motion sensor triggered by people walking in, illuminated a constellation on the artist’s body.

Stars from the flags of countries in the Western Hemisphere were fixed with string to his body. The artist stood completely still. Various- sized stars on his body and four more on the floor in front and behind him were lit in iridescent blue.

The constellation represented a conceptual map in which no state is superior to another. Instead, they come together within a unified field. The visual of Martiel’s nakedness cloaked in galactic darkness combined with the unprejudiced constellation that was sewn on to him was striking in its beauty; it also implied peace and fixed nature. The performance was called América.

Another perspective is that the performance asserted the legacy and history of the Western Hemisphere as if it’s written into the skin, indeed, into the very DNA of those of us rooted in the New World.

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by Laila Pedro for Hyperallergic

Havana-born artist Carlos Mariel does the kind of stripped-down durational performance work that’s the best argument for the power of the form — its immediacy and intensity perfectly embody why some ideas need to be (can only be) transmitted in this way.

His minimal, gutting performances employ a few elements to crack open history, politics, and emotions, revealing how these are inseparable from embodied experience. This year’s “Hacerse Olvido (To Become Forgotten),” for example, had exactly two components: Martiel, and a rubber inner tube. Splayed across it, nude, on the gallery’s concrete floor, Martiel’s figure was a haunting evocation of the numberless nameless people who’ve drowned in the attempt to cross the shark-infested, tempestuous Florida Strait from Cuba to the US over the past half-century. (Not for nothing, he performed it in Havana.) In 2016’s “SOS,” Martiel stood in the center of a Caracas gallery wearing bloodstained clothes donated by eight Venezuelan dissidents.

Monday evening at Y Gallery, Martiel performs a work with his signature mix of wrenching clarity, physicality, and cultural freight: “’Continent’ … reflects on the way black bodies are sequestered, seized, and abducted; and the consequent plunder and despoil of the cultural and material wealth of the African continent.” Rather than leaving this history in the past, Martiel insists on its urgency for colonized and post-colonial contexts today.

Monday, November 27, 7-8 pm (Rescheduled from Wednesday, November 22)
Y Gallery (319 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan)

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November 27, 2017
7:00 pm

Carlos Martiel presents a new performance, “Continent”. This performance reflects on the way black bodies are sequestered, seized, and abducted; and the consequent plunder and despoil of the cultural and material wealth of the African Continent. This work is not reduced only to the history of the transatlantic slave trade. It is meant as a critique of the present situation of constant vulnerability and crisis in which African nations and others continue to be indiscriminately exploited by the postcolonial and neoliberal policies of the USA, European states, and other parts of the developed world.

About the artist:
Carlos Martiel (born 1989, Havana) lives and works in New York and Havana. He graduated in 2009 from the National Academy of Fine Arts “San Alejandro” in Havana. Between the years 2008-2010, he studied in the Cátedra Arte de Conducta, directed by the artist Tania Bruguera. Martiel’s works have been included in: the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Casablanca Biennale, Morocco; Biennial “La Otra”, Bogotá, Colombia; Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom; Pontevedra Biennial, Galicia, Spain; Havana Biennial, Cuba. He has had performances at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), Houston, USA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (MACZUL), Maracaibo, Venezuela; Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy; Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA; and Nitsch Museum, Naples, Italy. He has received several awards, including the Franklin Furnace Fund, New York, USA, 2016; “CIFOS Grants & Commissions Program Award,” Miami, USA, 2014; and “Arte Laguna,” Venice, Italy, 2013. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, USA; Zisa Zona Arti Contemporanee (ZAC), Palermo, Italy; Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, USA; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba, and elsewhere.

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and with general operating support from the New York State Council on the Arts.

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Y Gallery New York | 319 Grand St, New York, NY 10002