Film Premiere
New film "Deseos / رغبات" at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, May 14th at 7:30pm
Deseos / رغبات (Desires) exposes the ways in which medicine, law, religion, and cultural tradition shaped dominant discourses of the gendered and sexual body through the narration of two parallel stories. The first is that of Martina, who lived in Colombia during the late colonial period of the early 19th century. The second is the life of Nour, who lived in Beirut during the late Ottoman Empire. Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents an imaginary correspondence between these women. Separated by geography, culture, and religion they both faced the consequences of engaging in same sex relations and defying gender norms. The colonial Court prosecuted Martina in 1803 for being a “hermaphrodite” after being accused by her female lover of having an “unnatural” body. Martina was tried in a court of law and ultimately set free after medical doctors appointed by the court were unable to find evidence of her lover’s accusation. This story is documented in the 1803 legal case found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Bogotá, Colombia. Meanwhile in Beirut, Nour married her female lover's brother after her mother found them making love. Despite the fact that Nour's story does not occur in a courtroom nor is it found in a legal case, notions of Islamic and late Ottoman laws, cultures, and histories condition her narrative. Premiere Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, May 14th at 7:30pm
Launch
Gender Talents at the New Museum, May 3, 2015
Join Carlos Motta to celebrate the launch of “Gender Talents,” a web-based project by Motta that engages movements and discourses for gender self-determination within trans and intersex communities internationally. The event will feature a screening of selected video portraits drawn from the project as well as a conversation with Motta, legendary author Kate Bornstein, intersex activist and sex therapist Tiger Devore, queer studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, artist Tara Mateik, and Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, New Museum. “Gender Talents” features an online archive of video portraits of trans and intersex activists who thoughtfully perform gender as a personal, social, and political opportunity rather than as a social condemnation. Using in-depth interviews conducted with jogappa and trans communities in India, sex workers in Colombia and Guatemala, and intersex activists in the United States, “Gender Talents” documents the ways in which society conditions and regulates bodies and how gender activists build politics of resistance and action. Of specific concern is how individuals and organizations fight for state recognition, access to work and health benefits, and the right to self-determine their identities and self-govern their bodies, among other pressing issues. “Gender Talents” is also an ongoing platform for physical events that reflect on alternative ways to think about the rigid nature of the gender binary as it is enforced in society.
Symposium
Art Social, Change and the Urban Sphere, CCNY, March 26, 2015
Symposium
VISIBLE/INVISIBLE, New Museum, March 7, 2015
This daylong symposium questions how the legacy of identity politics might be reconsidered in light of our present culture, where making oneself visible is de rigueur and yet can also carry threatening connotations: being captured, tracked, or dangerously overexposed. Through a series of discussions with artists and curators who are renegotiating the identity politics of earlier generations, “VISIBLE/INVISIBLE” examines how the underlying goals of movements that demanded representation (both in art and in culture at large) remain urgent and yet require significant rethinking amid a transformed social and existential landscape. Invited speakers will provocatively consider how power is mapped and at the same time hijacked in society today—not just between centers and margins, but also between subcultures and across shifting alliances. In addition, they will reflect on and present arguments for and against identity politics, attempting to consider its accomplishments while simultaneously restating, refuting, or reconfiguring its terms in the present.Two person exhibition
Ornament, Simon Preston Gallery, New York, 22 February -22 March
Simon Preston Gallery is delighted to present Ornament, an exhibition of works by Amie Siegel and Carlos Motta, which will open to the public on Sunday, 22 February and run until 22 March, 2015.
Assembling two distinct projects, the exhibition creates anthropological divisions that evoke historical uncertainties and question the westernizing institutional lens and the cameras that document them. Unfolding through the witness of objects, each of the works chronicle alternative historical lineages, exploring both gender and sexuality. Drawing upon André Malraux’s proposition in ‘Musée Imaginaire’ – ‘The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture’ that displaces the physical art object and the museum through the photographic image, alternative interpretations emerge.
Group Exhibition
Canibalia, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, February 6 -26
Canibalia is a research around the notion and figure of the cannibal. The exhibition will entail a visual exploration on the anthropophagic subject, from where to (un)think cannibalism and the cannibal as spaces of dissidence, desire, community, ecology and exchange. With Theodor de Bry, Jeleton, Runo Lagomarsino, Candice Lin, Pablo Marte, Carlos Motta, Pedro Neves Marques, Manuel Segade, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané. Curated by Julia Morandeira ArrizabalagaOpening on February 6th, 2015 from 6 to 9pm. From February 6 to April, 26 2015
Solo Exhibition
Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, January 24- March 22, 2015
Röda Sten Konsthall is proud to open the 2015 season with a large survey exhibition of artist Carlos Motta. 2015.01.24 - 2015.03.22
