Collective exhibition "Negative Desire"

Negative desire It's a group exhibition in Martins&Montero, which investigates queer theory to trace a critique of the logics of reproducibility – understood here not only as a biological process of repetition, but as a normative principle that sustains the hegemonic, colonial, established world.

Curated by the artist Jota MombasaThe exhibition proposes an exercise in refusal and invention that casts a "negative ray" on the present – ​​an expression that evokes not only the desire to destroy the world as we know it, but also the desire to interrupt the recurrence of imposed ways of existing. The exhibition brings together artists who cultivate this gesture of undoing in their practices: not as a sterile negation, but as an opening to imagine what would emerge afterward.

The starting point is the work of the artist Hudinilson Jr., an unavoidable figure in Brazilian art who worked with the body, copying, and everyday life as territories for experimentation. His relationship with Xerox and xerography forms a poetics of deviated reproduction that distorts, dismantles, and reenacts his own image.

The curatorial team also connected with Hudinilson Jr. through a visit to his apartment-studio, still imbued with his presence. The exhibition proposes a kind of sensitive reimagining of this intimate space: accumulations, asymmetries, layers of life that overlap with an investigation of the limits of the body and space.

Alongside Hudinilson Jr., the exhibition brings together two artists from different generations, whose works intertwine in the same unease with the world and its compulsory reproduction. Bruna Kury, an artist from Rio de Janeiro, works in collaborations and collectives, such as the Coiote collective. Her work challenges regimes of authorship and power, creating alliances with dissenting bodies. Zines, protest phrases, and tactical gestures compose a repertoire of insurgency that makes reproducibility a field of aesthetic and political dispute. Tetê, an artist from Pará, operates between visual poetry and photography. Her poem-diagrams and publications – both printed and digital – construct affective maps that dismantle the linearity of meaning. Her research traverses language, image, and the desire to rewrite the world from its fracture.

Among these three artists pulsates an antisocial movement, in the deepest sense of the word: that of refusing the pact with a society that excludes, normalizes, and corrects. In the works of all three artists, there is a desire for the world to "fall apart"—or at least, to stop repeating itself as it is. A negative and vital desire: not for the end in itself, but for the end as an opening to something else.

Paradoxically – or precisely because of this – their practices resort to copying, digital media, collage, and photography. The technique of reproducibility, in this context, does not reaffirm itself, but is taken as a fissure, as a space for reconfiguration, resignifying this idea that is as technical as it is political. These works do not deny repetition, but sabotage it from within, reinventing its contours and possibilities.

Jota Mombaça's curatorial approach is conceived as a visual essay on the limits of the present and the possibilities of its dissolution. With a trajectory that intertwines performance, poetry, and critical theory, Mombaça constructs, in this exhibition, a space of friction between the end and the future. It is not merely about imagining the collapse of the world as it has been structured, but about summoning images, gestures, and practices that anticipate what may emerge when the world ends. In this interval between ruin and reinvention, Negative Desire speculates that the world may not continue in the same way—and that this may be a good chance.

Service
Exhibition Negative desire
From October 30th to December 30th
Tuesday to Friday 10am to 19pm, Saturday 11am to 16pm