March 28, 2026–January 10, 2027
Demons, I thought. Demons. I hadn’t been thinking of the devil much lately—it seemed too quaint and camp a creature to assign to the genocidal death cults currently shattering and looting our shared world—but Carlos Motta’s survey in Linz put me in a newly demonic frame of mind. Motta’s queer auto-mythology, a corpus of artworks that the artist has built up since the nineties, spanning sculpture, self-portraiture, film, performance, and archival practices, takes in the heretical, the conceptual, and the demonic with pathos and bathos.
The Bogotá-born artist’s rigorous narration of the queer, non-western body, both pre-Hispanic and amidst its resistance to colonial-religious conquest, does not preclude him from reappropriating the empire’s signs and signifiers. Or its technocratic politics of force both past and present. Enter the devil. The Catholic Church has long employed it to represent those sexualities outside its binary-biological purview. Motta, in turn, uses the fallen angel as both hybrid figure and burning lens to look at queer, intersex, trans, and trans-interspecies bodies, their desires and their fabulations, and the violent, violating systems that would subjugate them.
Consider We The Enemy (2019), a series of tall, white, attenuated plinths that alone might suggest some modernist memorial or military graveyard. Atop each is a diminutive bronze bust of a devil’s head. The devil comes in many forms, it’s said, and Motta fulfills that here. Like twisted tokens, the devil’s taxonomy of faces cross culture and genre: Indigenous, Catholic, Celtic, Neolithic, Gothic, Romantic, but always freaky. See, too, the film installation Corpo Fechado—The Devil’s Work (2018), which narrates the story of José Francisco Pereira, an eighteenth-century West African man kidnapped and sold into slavery. Tried for sorcery by the Lisbon Inquisition, he was charged with sodomy after confessing to copulating with male demons. The film opens with the actor playing Pereira speaking wryly into the camera. He says he may be a product of your imagination, or maybe an angel facing the past. “My story might be a single catastrophe, which piles rubble on top of rubble.” At his feet, of course. Thus is he Benjamin’s angel of history, too.
The film proceeds in historical reenactments and archival documents, including Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (1840) and an eleventh-century text, by Italian monk Peter Damian, on “sodomites.” The monk’s name comes from the Greek damazo, “to conquer,” “to master,” as well as daimon, a divine entity. His text would shape Christianity’s sexual persecution of the Indigenous world amid European colonialism. “Sex with the devil was a pact against the cruelty of their dogma,” Pereira notes. The accompanying image, of Pereira in profile, his face buried in the black hood of the tall, faceless Damian, is of a kind of transgressive composite being. The scene seems to rhyme with an image in Pierre Huyghe’s film Liminals (2025), currently on view at Fondation Beyeler. Huyghe’s film—tremulous, atmospheric, and monochrome where Motta’s is baroque, droll, and chromatic—follows a naked woman, an empty black aperture where her face should be. Blindly wandering a barren, apocalyptic landscape, she finds a phallic piece of dark petrified wood and begins to haltingly face-fuck it.
The common reading of Huyghe’s faceless figure—that she exists outside time and space, that she is an ambiguous, hybrid entity among atomized states of being, fiction, and dystopian reality—seems some indictment of an imagination which can only conceive of this situation occurring to white bodies, in some faceless, timeless, stateless future. But Motta’s story of Pereira reveals that this exact liminal space of queer existence amid total violence, transgressive desire amid apocalypse (as it were), already existed. What wrought it then produces it now. The long colonial century, an imperialist time-space of baroque systems of violence against peoples and lands, continues apace, piling up like rubble at our feet.
Motta’s survey expertly delineates this matrix. The show’s four chapters, unfolding like a book or a film, limn pre-Hispanic homoeroticism, care work of queer liberation, nonhuman self-determination, and storytelling against epistemicide. Meanwhile, outside OK Linz’s main building, a small, round, Catholic chapel stands under a large oak in a courtyard. Inside, Motta's film Réquiem: Inverted World (2016) presents itself as some profane altarpiece. The artist—naked, bound, hung upside down, in the style of an inverted crucifixion—is seen suspended in another chapel, one from the sixteenth century, in Spain. Two bondage artists stand at his sides, working the ropes. The scene comes from Caravaggio, his Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1601), with its allegory of the corporeal body as script for suffering. Is the film about the transcendence of the body through elaborate systems of subjugation? Is it about images, the desire that drums dissonantly through them? The scores for resistance they provide for us?
The title of Motta’s exhibition presents these braided, bonded themes of desire for liberation and desire for sexual surrender—the artistic and political transcendence they offer—in a rough syntactical package: “Pleas of Resistance.” It is strange in the mouth. It is hard to remember. It moves, glitchingly, from the language of submission to the language of solidarity, liberatory desires of each. I thought of the Church, its newest acolytes and genocidaires, Vance, Thiel, et al. I thought of the suffering they continue to create for us. Images of. From resistance to surrender to resistance one goes, the world working the ropes.
