When Time Stands Still

Carlos Motta’s When Time Stands Still, the artist’s second solo show with the IAS, features new and recent installations, videos, and sculptures highlighting the artist’s preoccupation with the historical, aesthetic, and representational productions of difference and marginalization that shape the present. 

History rests heavily on the present in the works on view in When Time Stands Still. A new artwork created for the exhibition, The Ship of Fools, 2026, for instance, is a sculptural installation obliquely referencing past works bearing similar names: early Netherlandish artist’s Hieronymus Bosch’s painting from 1490–1500; woodcuts attributed to German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer from the 1490s. Despite the hundreds of years between those works and Motta’s three-dimensional reinterpretation, the critique of politics in the artist’s references and the portrayals of the vices and corruption rife in governance that Bosch and Dürer were making seem more than prescient; the sculptures materialize time as if stilled, with the past—and its images and representations—still regulating the present.

Other works differently question the role of images in this stilling of time. In an endurance-based video performance, No One, 2025, for over forty-six minutes the artist undertakes to keep his eyes open focused on one spot as a soundtrack combines sounds of drones and other military technologies with words banned for use in documents by the U.S. federal government. With his eyes watering and turning red from the strain, the artist enacts the experience of witnessing, withstanding, confronting, and resisting the bombardment of images, both historical and otherwise, that normalize harm.

Motta’s timely intervention extends beyond the artworks. The sculptures of The Ship of Fools sit on a large-raised platform designed to be also used as a stage for a performance series curated by Motta and Rachel Nelson, IAS director. The series has been organized to provide other moments of reflection on issues of time and representation with performances by renowned artists Regina Jose Galindo, Okwui Okpokwasili, Samita Sinha, and Alexandra Tatarsky, each of whom will contribute works that promise to resonate with the demands for careful attention implicit in When Time Stands Still. Sinha, who also collaborated with Motta on Song to the Siren, 2026, on view in the exhibition, will launch the series on October 2, 5–8 p.m.

When Time Stands Still and the performance series is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to create a future free of prisons.