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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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