Searching for We’wha
2014 - Photography (Photography)
Series of 5 photographic triptychs, 133.4 x 66 cm each
Carlos Motta
Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression. With this work, Carlos Motta aims to question gender fluidity, indeterminacy, neutrality and non-conformity, using We’wha as an image of the ways in which Two-Spirit American Indians express gender in non-Western non-traditional ways. They are often accepted and revered by their tribes, and in We’wha’s case she even became an official representative of their social interests. The project documents indigenous territories, ruins and sacred landscapes as it invokes We’wha and the ways in which certain traditions have been violently erased. We’wha will never be found since she doesn’t exist anywhere beyond colonial narratives, but the photographic and textual trajectories reveal Western epistemological and representational processes and their ingrained moralism.
Carlos Motta’s is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work seeks to document the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities through a variety of variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. This documentary-archive process operates as a means of confronting normative structures and dominant narratives of representation. His practice seeks to excavate silent histories and suppressed narratives and thus draws on extensive research into political history with a focus on post-colonial societies.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Papa Ibra Tall
During the years of President Senghor, Papa Ibra Tall was influential in the cultural dimension of Senegalese politics, participating in the implementation of the Dakar School, a movement of artistic renewal born at the dawn of the country’s independence between 1960 and 1974 and which was encouraged by President Senghor...
Related artist(s) to: Carlos Motta » Julieta Aranda, » Jimmie Durham, » Oliver Ressler, » Anton Vidokle, » Bouchra Khalili, » Coco Fusco, » Liam Gillick, » Petra Bauer, » Buenos Aires, » Carolina Caycedo
» see more
© » KADIST
Julieta Aranda
2016The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
© » KADIST
Anton Vidokle
2020Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness...
© » KADIST
Carolina Caycedo
2015Carolina Caycedo’s practice conveys her very personal passion and relationship to water, as a powerful necessity and spiritual reminder...
© » KADIST
Carolina Caycedo
2013In this two-channel video installation, Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Called Her Yuma , Carolina Caycedo gathered footage during numerous research trips to dam sites in the Harz Mountains, Saxony, Westphalia and the Black Forest in Germany interspersed with images of the Rio Magdalena region in Colombia...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Ad Minoliti
2019In Ad Minoliti’s expansive three-panel painting Abstracción geométrico-galáctica the artist’s hallmark geometric abstractions serve as playful substitutes for more straightforward depictions of the world...
© » KADIST
Lam Tung Pang
2013Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions...
© » LENS CULTURE
Dreaming on the Hudson - Photographs by Andrew Kung | Essay by Magali Duzant | LensCulture Feature Dreaming on the Hudson Questioning preconceived notions of masculinity and Asian American identity against the backdrop of the Hudson River Valley, Andrew Kung weaves a new American pastoral in images that capture tender moments of youth...
© » KADIST
siren eun young jung
2015Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk ...