Vera Mota
Porto, Portugal, 1982
Vera Mota (Porto, 1982) holds a degree in Fine Arts – Sculpture (2000–2005) and a Master’s in Contemporary Artistic Practices (2006–2008) from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. She also completed the Research and Choreographic Creation course at Fórum Dança (2005–2006).
Her artistic practice manifests primarily through sculpture, drawing, and performance. With regular public presentations since 2003, her work engages a strong material component while asserting the body as an almost always indispensable agent. Performance emerges in her practice as a means of production, composition, or even staging, fostering and articulating the participation of the body as a generative methodology and a central axis for conceptual formulations.
More recently, while remaining focused on the politics of the body, her work has developed a sculptural animism that calls for other perspectives on the body, other bodies, and materialities. It seeks to stage processes of transfiguration, the declassification of functions, and transfers between organic and inorganic, geological and biological bodies.
Among her most recent solo exhibitions are Restless (Rampa, Porto); Performing Matters (Galeria Bruno Múrias, Lisbon); Ensayo de Fatiga (Galeria L21, Barcelona); Haze (Appleton Associação Cultural, Lisbon); and Sem Corpo/Disembodied (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves), among others.
Within exhibitions and performance programs, her work has also been presented at Galeria Municipal do Porto; Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva; MACE – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas; Matadero (Madrid, Spain); Ireland’s Biennial (Limerick, Ireland); and SESC (São Paulo, Brazil), among others.
Her work is represented in the collection of the Serralves Foundation; the Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection; the António Cachola Collection – MACE, Elvas; the Ilídio Pinho Collection, Porto; Centro de Arte Oliva – Norlinda and José Lima Collection, São João da Madeira; the PLMJ Collection, Lisbon; and the Maria and Armando Cabral Collection.
