Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, 1991 \ Lives and works between Lisbon, Portugal; and Amsterdam, Netherlands
Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work derives from poetry, critical theory, and performance. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in her practice, as well as the resilience, capacity for memory, and ephemerality of materials. Her work often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Through performance, visionary fiction, and situational strategies of knowledge production, she intends to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and the figuration of what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium.
In 2020, Mombaça was granted the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in Paris and the position of writer-in-residence at Nottingham Contemporary. Her recent solo exhibitions featured the projects A METHOD/ GRIEVING TIME, West Den Haag (2024); MATERIAL GIRL/ ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, Centre D’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); YOU WILL KNOW/ THE DAUGHTERS OF THE DRIEST RAIN, Martins&Montero (2024); A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP, CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts (2023); and THE SINKING SHIP/PROSPERITY, Kadist San Francisco (2022). Her visual and performative work has been included in institutional group exhibitions such as the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa (2024); Black Ancient Futures, MAAT Lisboa (2024); In and Out of Place. Land after Information 1992 – 2024, Kunstverein Hamburg (2024); Passos do encantamento: Bienal das Amazônias (2024); Echoes Unbound, Foundation Beyeler (2024); La bruit de la chair, FRAC des Pays de La Loire (2023); El terremoto esta intacto, Fundació Miro (2023); My Oma, Kunstinstituut Melly (2023); Bad Timing – or How to Write History Without Objects, DEN FRIE Centre of Contemporary Art (2023); 22nd Biennale of Sydney, NIRIN (2020); More, More, More, TANK SHANGHAI (2020); the 46th Salon de Artistas in Colombia (2019); the 34th São Paulo Biennale, Though it’s dark, still I sing (2021), among others. Her work is included in the Kadist Collection, as well as in the GfZK (Leipzig, DE) collection.
As a writer, Mombaça is the author of Ñ V NOS MATAR AGORA, a collection of texts published by EGEAC (Portugal, 2019) and Editora Cobogó (Brazil, 2021). Besides that, she has had her essays and fictional writings included in institutional publications such as The Contemporary Journal, Afterall, Le Magazine – Jeu de Paume, Terremoto.Mx, HAU 3000, Revista Piseagrama, among others.
