The exhibition Pleas of Resistance traverses more than twenty-five years of practice by the artist Carlos Motta (Bogota, 1978), who consistently engages with the body and sexual dissidence as a terrain of experimentation and political contestation. His early explorations of photographic self-portraiture are shown alongside his most recent performances and video installations. The exhibition explores the magnitude of Motta’s artistic research and its implacable rigor in relation to the archive, interrogating its violence, its silencing and its desires. Motta’s work challenges the imposition of Eurocentric epistemologies – from the time of the conquest and colonial period in the Americas to the present day – and considers the legacy of religion as a perpetrator and disturbing vehicle of coloniality. 

Motta initiated his artistic trajectory at a young age, in the late 1990s, shortly before emigrating to New York and settling there. The exhibition pays close attention to the artist’s engagement with political histories and social movements – specifically the politics of sexuality and gender and the HIV/Aids epidemic – and their contemporary manifestations on the fragility of bodies. The notion of the collective body and the artist’s attention to the politics of care are central to both individual and self-representation, as well as to the various forms of collaboration that the artist has realised in his diverse projects over the years. 

Motta’s works propose alternative accounts to the hegemonic narratives of history, religion and democracy. His work and artistic collaborations materialise the potential for social reform by rewriting the official histories of colonization, military dictatorships and neo-fascism – in a pilgrimage that is always blasphemous, corporeal and political.