Opening & performance • Jota Mombaça • MATERIAL GIRL/ ALL THAT YOU TOUCH

About

PERSONAL EXHIBITION
Jota Mombaça
MATERIAL GIRL/ ALL THAT YOU TOUCH
A proposal by Andrea Bellini
08.06-08.09.24

Opening Friday June 7, 6-9pm
Performances at 6.30pm & 8.30pm

The Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to present “MATERIAL GIRL/ ALL THAT YOU TOUCH”, a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça that offers a non-linear journey through her multidisciplinary practice, highlighting the conceptual/formal link in the artist's early works - at the center of which are the body, gesture and the spoken and written word - and the evolution of this link in her more recent iterations.

Jota Mombaça's artistic practice is grounded in writing as well as performance, and is informed by critical theories - gender studies and post-colonial studies are particularly important to the artist's engaged approach.

Her work addresses issues of the entanglement of human and elemental bodies in a way of thinking that extrapolates the boundaries of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, proposing a new way of inhabiting embodied positions. This idea of entanglement, as the exhibition reveals, is as much a working method as a principle of monstration: gestures and texts distilled from early works are presented in remixed form, such as the immersive composition of wall writings.

The thinking of philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, in particular her notion of re/de/composition, also guides this ongoing restructuring of Mombaça's work. Working within the framework of neo-materialism, Da Silva opposes the ordered assumptions of colonial domination - the separability, determinism and sequentiality resulting from identity, nation, ethnicity and gender - with a vision of a world driven by the positional, fractal and “poethic” thinking of black futurity, resulting in a contingent, indeterminate and complex composition of intertwined singularities.

The title of this exhibition, which is also that of the artist's first monograph, is based on this perspective. According to Jota Mombaça, this title “indicates a trajectory of thought and gesture that is more than subjective, properly contextual and climatic, in which different expressions of materiality and transformation present not only a personal point of view but the very conditions of its emergence”.