Carlos Martiel

This exhibition is in collaboration with A/POLITICAL

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

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.

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.

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

(more info here)

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

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.

(more info here)

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.

(más info aquí)

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.

(more info here)