The practice of Vera Mota (Porto, 1982), rooted in performance, sculpture, and drawing, resolves around the politics of the body. Her work summons a strong material component, where performance emerges as a means of production, composition, or even staging, promoting and equating the participation of the body as a generative methodology and axis for conceptual formulations.

 

Although as a subject of (non)representation the body has occupied a central position in Vera Mota's work, the strategies of its scrutiny and politicisation have undergone a gradual transformation throughout the past years. Moving from performance as a medium and the performative act of production, some of her recent works materialise a new form of sculptural animism and a new agency, while shifting the instrumentalization of the performative into a series of coincidental and strictly conceptual acts, or bringing the body back through a new materiality of anthropomorphic sculptures. The form of her sculptures, their context, palpable physicality or suspended function, operates as a continuous reminder of the bodily, which, in many ways, affirms the presence of the body, even through its possible absence.

 

The works of Vera Mota have been featured in exhibitions at Galeria Municipal and Serralves Contemporary Art Museum (Porto, PT); Matadero (Madrid, ES); Ireland’s Biennial (Limerick, IE), and SESC (São Paulo, BR), among other.

 

Current show:

 

⊃ DISEMBODIED @ Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art

 

 

⊃ Selected Works  2012/2022  PDF

 

 

⊃ Interview by Miguel Von Hafe Pérez