Screening and Q&A: Carlos Motta

August 5 -7 2016:

EuroPride: Carlos Motta
Nefandus Trilogy
2013
Courtesy of the artist

About Nefandus

Carlos Motta's Nefandus Trilogy (2013) is a three-part visual essay, consisting of the parts Nefandus, Naufragios and La visión de los vencidos. In this trilogy Motta examines the pre-colonial and colonial heritage of South America, specifically with regard to views on (homo)sexuality. Motta narrates the untold stories of unwritten histories that have been suppressed by the weight of religion and morality. They were condemned as abominable sins ('pecados nefandos') by the Catholic colonizers: the European colonists and evangelist missionaries outlawed acts of sodomy, turning indigenous same-sex rituals into punishable crimes and profoundly changing the natives' relationship to sex. In the first part of the trilogy, a Spanish-speaking man and an indigenous man search for traces of this hidden past in the landscape while canoeing the Don Diego river in Colombia. The second part of the trilogy is filmed in a similar manner, with the camera seeming to 'look' for remnants of history – this time in the city of Lisbon, where in the 17th century a Portuguese man named Luiz Delgado was tortured and tried by the Inquisitions for engaging in homosexual relationships. La visión de los vencidos (The Defeated) tells a story that has been passed on across generations by oral transmission: while navigating the jungle, an indigenous slave recounts the execution of men performing a collective homoerotic ritual.

Q&A with the artist

The film screening on August 5, will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).

MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carlos Motta (1978, Bogotá) is an upcoming Colombian multi-disciplinary artist based in New York. His work addresses the histories of queer culture and the politics of sex and gender, with particular regard to suppressed histories, communities and identities. Motta's work has been shown in international venues such as Tate Modern (London), The New Museum, The Guggenheim Museum and MoMA/PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York) and Witte de With (Rotterdam). Motta was guest editor of the e-flux journal issue “(Im)practical (Im)possibilities” (April 2013) about contemporary queer art and culture. In 2014 he received the Future Generation Art Prize of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev, Ukraine. His Nefandus Trilogy (2013) was shown in several festivals, such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2014) and the 10th Xposed International Queer Film Festival in Berlin (2015). In 2013 Nefandus Trilogy received the Catalonia Rambles Award.

Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen has been a curator at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam since 1995. He organised various solo exhibitions, for example of Gabriel Orozco, Gilbert & George, Tino Sehgal, Wolfgang Tillmans, De Rijke/De Rooij and Isa Genzken, and group exhibitions like Wild Walls (1995), Peiling 5 (1996) and Beyond Imagination (2012). From 1996 until 2006 he was head of the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) and from 2000 until 2003 he was associate director exhibitions of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. In 2005 he was a curator of the filminstallation Mandarin Ducks, from De Rijke/De Rooij, for the Dutch pavilion of the 51^st Venice Biennial. 

Van Nieuwenhuyzen has been involved with various projects and exhibitions that responded to queer and gay-related topics. In conjunction with the activist exhibition series Commitment, organized by the Stedelijk during the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s, among other projects he created a presentation with posters by Félix González-Torres and screened Derek Jarman’s film Blue. He later initiated the exhibition From the Corner of the Eye (1998), featuring art in which the homosexual or queer gaze is articulated in unexpected ways and engages with the other signifying layers of the works. The exhibition opened in the context of the Amsterdam Gay Games (1998), for which Van Nieuwenhuyzen also commissioned posters by artists such as Bhupen Khakhar, Robert Wilson, Catherine Opie and Wolfgang Tillmans, to be spread throughout the city.

SELECTED FILMS:

Jan Dibbets
Pandora's Box: Jan Dibbets on Another Photograpy
Loan from Paris Musées and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Dates: July 1 – 3  2016

Zachary Formwalt 
An Unknown Quantity
2015
Acquired for the SMA collection, 2015
Dates: July 8 – 10 2016

Rudi Fuchs
A selection of works from the collection
Acquired for the SMA collection 1993 - 2003
Dates: July 15 – 17 2016

EuroPride2016
A selection of works from the collection
Acquired by the SMA
Dates July 22 – 24 2016

EuroPride: Zanele Muholi + Q&A
Difficult Love
2010 
Loan from STEVENSON Cape Town and Johannesburg
Dates: July 29 – 31 2016