Carlos Martiel

By Katy Diamond Hamer for Artforum

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

By Clara Maria Apostolatos for The Brooklyn Rail

Three years ago at El Museo del Barrio, Afro-Cuban performance artist Carlos Martiel performed Monumento I (2021), part of his acclaimed “Monumento” series where, following actions varying by context, he stoically embodies a temporary monument to histories of oppression. In this inaugural piece, he stood atop a white pedestal, covered to his shoulders in blood sourced from bodies belonging to minority or marginalized groups in the United States, his nude body exposed in the middle of the empty gallery space. The artwork resonated with the events of the summer of 2020, marked by the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. Now, photographic and video documentation of Monumento I alongside its subsequent iterations returns to El Museo as part of Martiel’s first solo show in New York, Cuerpo. Through his performances, Martiel orchestrates situations of physical and psychological duress, allowing him to embody and make visible the oppression that has shaped the lived experiences of migrant, Latinx, and Black communities, among others. Cuerpo offers a mid-career survey of two decades of his key performances, featuring photographs, videos, and preparatory drawings.

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By Travis Diehl for The New York Times
May 23, 2024

Confronting you head-on are a hanging flag, and a man in danger of hanging.

The flag, unfurled vertically between two white structural columns in a gallery at El Museo del Barrio, resembles the stars and stripes of the United States, except the blue and red are black, and the white has been dyed a gristly pink — stained with blood, according to the exhibition materials, given by undocumented immigrants living in New York.

The man is Carlos Martiel, an Afro-Cuban performance artist known for putting his body through grueling, painful trials while audiences watch. He’s not actually present in El Museo del Barrio: A large monitor leaning against the back wall, aligned with the flag, plays footage from a 2022 performance titled “Cuerpo” — body, in Spanish. Martiel is naked except for a rope, looped around his neck and attached to the ceiling of a gallery. A handful of people take turns shouldering his legs and propping up his back while he grimaces in the noose.

These are the two strongest, most unsettling artworks in Martiel’s first major survey, also titled “Cuerpo,” in New York City, where he’s lived since 2012. The words “undocumented immigrants” in the written description of the flag work, “Insignia VII,” charge it with violence. The noose performance is tense, dynamic and uncertain, even from the safe distance of a video. You are dared to deny the suffering of the artist, or of those he stands for.

The 16 performances represented in the gallery by videos, photographs and drawings include more than a decade of ordeals of endurance and self-mutilation, in which the often-stoic artist evokes the brutal history of colonialism, racism and enslavement. Martiel doesn’t intellectualize slavery’s wake; instead, he makes it terribly present, in the body of a living person: his own.

A video of the earliest piece on view, “Prodigal Son,” from 2010, shows the artist pinning his father’s Cuban military medals to his naked chest. For “Continente,” from 2017, Martiel had nine small diamonds embedded in his skin, then he lay supine in a New York gallery while a white man sliced them out. In images of every successive work, you can see the marks left on Martiel’s body by the previous ones.

You can only imagine Martiel’s pain; at El Museo, you also feel his absence. Seeing a photograph of Martiel standing with an armload of animal entrails (“Monument III,” 2021) is different from smelling that gore. Instead of sharing space with the artist, a viewer must relate to these bodily performances from the remove of pictures and sketches, as well as their first-person descriptions on the list of works.

Here’s the explanation of “Monument II,” executed at the Guggenheim in 2021: “I stand handcuffed on a pedestal in the center of the museum’s rotunda. This work reflects on the structural racism and political and systemic violence historically suffered by the Black and immigrant body in the United States.” (Before he moved to New York, Martiel often reflected on the racial prejudice in Cuban society.)

It’s damning to restage the auction block of a slave market in a museum lobby, a (literally and historically) “white” space dedicated to beautiful and provocative objects. Martiel’s posture is also dignified, erotic, a sardonic echo of the chiseled physiques of classical marbles on their plinths.

But once the shock of these performance documents abates, you’re left with the work’s heavy metaphors — and images that, while horrible, are easier to stomach than the steady spectacle of Black and brown death in the news.

This survey makes me miss the wry contradictions of “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform),” by Félix González-Torres — another queer Cuban-born artist working in New York, who died in 1996 — in which a muscled man displayed on a blocklike stage wears tight shorts and a Walkman and dances to music only he can hear. His objectification is cut with joy. It makes me miss the perverse self-debasement of Pope.L, whose prone crawls through major cities invite the madcap uncertainty of an uncontrolled world, in a way that Martiel’s elegant symbolic presentations — which include digging a Mali sign for wisdom into a lawn using his teeth — don’t.

There’s no mistaking the message, for example, in a photograph at El Museo of the 2019 performance “South Body,” in which the shaft of a small American flag pierces the skin of Martiel’s shoulder. It leaves a fat scar.

And Martiel’s endurance performances seem undercut by the idea that — unlike the enslaved people being appraised in the markets of 18th-century New York — he could climb down from that pedestal at any moment. Eventually, that’s exactly what he did.

Then again, free will is as essential as gut force to Martiel’s work — just as it is for the durational performances of EJ Hill, Nona Faustine, or Miles Greenberg, Black artists who similarly put themselves on public display in various states of nakedness and distress. By choosing his fate, Martiel pushes past simple victimhood, daring to represent every victim of racist violence — and pins the viewer in the position of every perpetrator or witness. Whether or not your skin color matches the pale pink stripes on Martiel’s flag. And if a man were really hanging from his neck, who would let him choke?

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In this special commission for Frieze Week New York 2024, photographer and director Tess Ayano shoots five outstanding New York performers.

For the 2021 performance Monumento II, Carlos Martiel stood for two hours on a pedestal in the rotunda of the Guggenheim: naked, handcuffed and immobile, a living memorial to injustice. Born in Havana, Martiel has taken part in biennials from Venice to Vancouver, Cuenca to Casablanca, but this May sees the Cuban American artist’s New York homecoming with “Cuerpo” at El Museo del Barrio. His first solo exhibition in the city, the survey details the artist’s commitment to intensive, durational performance and efforts to make the operations of power viscerally apparent: in 2023’s Nobody, a flagpole becomes a whipping post. “Cuerpo” results from Martiel’s receipt of the Maestro Dobel Latinx Prize, supported by Maestro Dobel Tequila.

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FRIEZE, New York.