With a singular and reflective career, Vera Mota (Porto, 1982) has been developing her work around the politics of the body, promoting and weighing its participation as generative methodology and axis for conceptual formulations. Resorting mainly to sculpture, drawing and performance, and thus taking advantage of the breadth and permeability that these disciplines offer, her artistic practice involves a strong material component.

In the work of Vera Mota, performance emerges as a means of production, composition and even
staging, in a process where the body, as the almost always indispensable agent, imprints its gestures and circulations. The artist pays special attention to the economy of presence, effort and action, proposing successive exercises of repositioning of the body, by subjecting it at times to processes of almost complete erosion of its characteristics. Vera Mota revaluates the modes of representation of the
body, proposing processes and strategies of disqualification, transference or transfiguration of forms, status or functions, among bodies and the parts that compose them. The artist thus assumes a sculptural animism and reclaims other perspectives for the body and materiality.

In DISEMBODIED, the artist’s first solo exhibition in a museum context – as if directly from the hands to the head – proposes a permanent and tense dialogue between drawing and sculpture, in which the
spectators find themselves involved.

Produced by the Serralves Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto in collaboration with

the artist, the exhibition is curated by Filipa Loureiro.