The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to announce MATERIAL GIRL/ ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, a solo exhibition devoted to Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça which traces a nonlinear path within the artist’s multidisciplinary practice, highlighting the conceptual/formal nexus in the early works—centered on the body, gesture, and the spoken and written word—and the evolution of that nexus in more recent output.

The artistic practice of Jota Mombaça is grounded in writing and performance and fueled by critical theory. Gender and postcolonial studies are particularly important to the artist’s engaged approach.

Mombaça’s work tackles new issues related to the entanglement of human and elemental bodies, in a thought that extrapolates the boundaries of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and proposes a new way of inhabiting embodied positionalities. This idea of entanglement is also a working method and exhibition principle, as revealed by this show; it presents distilled gestures and texts from the early works in a remixed form, for example in the immersive composition of wall writings.

The thought of philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva—particularly her notion of re/de/composition—guides Mombaça’s reimagining of their own work. Moving within the framework of neo-materialism, Da Silva opposes the ordered assumptions of colonial rule (separability, determinacy, and sequentiality resulting in identity, nation, ethnicity, and gender) with a vision of a world animated by the positional, fractal, and “poethic” thinking of Black futurity. The result is a contingent, indeterminate, and complex composition of intertwined singularities.

The title of the exhibition—Jota Mombaça’s first survey—is inspired by this perspective. According to the artist, it “points to a more-than-subjective, properly contextual, and climatic trajectory of thought and gesture, in which different expressions of materiality and transformation present not only a personal point of view but its very conditions of emergence.”

This exhibition is curated by Andrea Bellini.