Wendy Vogel on Carlos Motta and Tiamat Legion Medusa

Fixing a set of emerald-green and darkly mesmerizing eyes on the digicam for a 2022 video on this exhibition, Tiamat Legion Medusa, the titular topic of the piece, asserts, “I don’t wish to die trying like a human.” Throughout the previous twenty years, the Bruni, Texas–primarily based performer has achieved legendary standing within the body-modification group for endeavor a simultaneous transition in gender (male to feminine) and species (human to reptile). Medusa—who prefers it/its pronouns—positions its reptilian metamorphosis as a protest gesture, refusing identification with the onerous breed of mammal that has harmed it. Certainly, Medusa, who has been residing with HIV because the mid-Nineties, is a survivor of grievous traumas, resembling youngster abuse, rape, homophobic violence, and familial estrangement. Its transformation contains facial horn implants, quite a few piercings, the alternative of tooth with sharp fangs, a cut up tongue, ear-cartilage elimination, a reshaped nostril, full-body tattoos, and an orchiectomy (testicle elimination). The performer’s intensive alterations recommend an externalization of staggering inner ache.

Regardless of the horrors Medusa has skilled, it’s strikingly charismatic. So, too, is Carlos Motta, the Colombia-born artist who enlisted Medusa for Once I Go away This World, 2022, a collaborative suspension efficiency documented in an eponymous quick movie. On the climax of this work, we see Motta dangling nude in a crucifixion-like pose. His harnessed physique has been suspended and tightly certain to a horizontal pole by braided ropes, which dig deeply and painfully into his flesh. In the meantime, Medusa rises above the bottom, held aloft by rigging linked to shark hooks that pierce its torso and legs.

Time appears to gradual to a molasses-like crawl all through the work’s ten-minute run time, most of which focuses on Medusa’s preparations for its dramatic ascent. The digicam sweeps throughout Medusa’s physique—which is roofed with tattoos of shimmering scales—recording the performer’s deep focus as a technician cuts into its flesh. When Medusa is hauled up by hooks from a medical desk, its limbs start to involuntarily shake. The technician gingerly grasps the perimeters of its head and whispers one thing earlier than Medusa bodily releases its personal weight, permitting the finely calibrated rigging to carry its physique because it sways from the bits of steel penetrating its tautly pulled pores and skin. Motta swings into view solely through the movie’s remaining minute.

This work’s pointed references to Renaissance non secular imagery builds upon themes that Motta has been exploring for years. Drawing on his engagement with portraiture, Motta has created politicized endurance performances the place he bodily manifests the collective ache of the queer group. For Inverted World, 2016, he was strung up by rope-bondage masters in an upside-down pose emulating that of the tortured determine in Caravaggio’s portray Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1601. In Legacy, 2019, Motta wore a dental gag whereas attempting to recite a historical past of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Hook suspension—a subcultural observe related to efficiency artists resembling Ron Athey and Stelarc—has lengthy been a characteristic within the sacred rituals of the Mandan Native American Nation and the Tamil Hindus, amongst different cultures.

In Tiamat Legion Medusa, which was proven on a small monitor alongside the cinematically projected Once I Go away This World, Medusa reveals the religious import of its suspension observe: “Once I’m being hooked I’m additionally in a state of trance, mentally, bodily, emotionally.” Though Medusa’s modifications indicate a withdrawal from human society, the artist additionally appears to bravely attain out towards it. Medusa converses overtly about its dysfunctional household, skilled incarnations (starting from a financial institution vp to HIV/AIDS educator to efficiency artist), and the mythological foundation of its varied names (together with the previous moniker NoMan Pan). Although Medusa’s and Motta’s work offers in ache and violence, additionally it is suffused by an astonishing tenderness—a sort of self-sacrifice and vulnerability that programs via the output of earlier physique artists resembling Bob Flanagan and Gina Pane. However the pair are not any martyrs, as they’ve zero need to absolve us of our quite a few and egregious sins. Particularly for Medusa, survival is dependent upon distinguishing itself from humanity—to live_ despite _humanity. In a time of an ongoing plague and a possible international battle, that message rings loud and clear.

— Wendy Vogel