What Would Jota Mombaça Change About the Art World? ‘Everything.’
Jota Mombaça
In less than a decade, Jota Mombaça has cemented herself as one of the global art landscape’s most urgent voices. Fusing critical theory and a reservoir of media (among them drawing, poetry, installation, and performance), the Brazilian artist charts the life cycles of gendered, racialized, and environmental traumas like the Transatlantic slave trade or evolving climate catastrophes—and the tactics humans have developed to weather them. Waterways have been a recent channel for this expansive inquiry: Mombaça’s current cycle of performances examines how, from the canals of Venice to the swampland origins of Berlin, water can be a life-giving force, an agent of destruction, and a path to power—or all three at once.
The natural world also serves as inspiration in the multidisciplinary artist’s latest work, The Muted Saints. Commissioned for the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR Festival, the three-act opera will be performed at the Hallam Lake Nature Preserve on July 29. Inspired by a 2023 short story by Mombaça about a protagonist who transitions from human to geological form, the ambitious commission radiates outwards from its Colorado surroundings, which Mombaça visited earlier this year, to “speak of the interconnectedness of planetary existence.”
[text by Ella Martin-Gachot]
Maria Thereza Alves presents her project “Council of Beings” in the Helsinki Biennal. The exhibitions take place in the maritime setting of Vallisaari Island, in Esplanade Park, in the heart of Helsinki, and in the Tennis Palace of the Helsinki Art Museum, HAM.
The theme “Shelter” is inspired by the island habitat of Vallisaari, which has been preserved from human presence for decades. The biennial reflects on the fragile relationship between humanity and the natural world. Going beyond anthropocentric perspectives, the works of art on display put animals, plants, fungi, insects and minerals in the spotlight. The biennial seeks to create new spaces of protection and inspire positive environmental action.
