Past Exhibition
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In Complete Breech, Nando Messias stages a new performance utilising sculptural acrobatics and a choreography of mythmaking, trans rights and bodily autonomy. The work weaves together the ancestral rhythms and imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian sacred rites as well as the mock births of London’s eighteenth-century molly-house subculture. The artist’s body is poised on a pedestal as a monument of transition, honesty and precarity. It is deconstructed and flayed, stripped of power or signification, in an exquisite critique of rights, identity and historicity.
Please note this performance contains nudity
Nando Messias is a performer who is trans-disciplinary and resistant to easy categorisation, forging a dynamic tension between the opposing demands of live art, performance art, fashion, academia and queer approaches. Messias’ work deliberately blurs the lines of form, centring the trans/non-binary, excluded and oppressed body—a body for which they have had to make room for in the world. Messias has performed in different spaces: nightclubs, theatres, art galleries and the streets.
Messias’ practice is rooted in their personal experience of being in the world, offering very individual, creative and critical responses to the violence, transphobia and other forms of discrimination and exclusion they have experienced as a trans/non-binary, ageing immigrant. Despite the political and ethical foreground to their performances, the work is distinctive and unique in its engagement with radical beauty, awe, rigour, glamour and fierceness— all inflected with a light dash of humour. Recently, Messias has been focusing their attention on trans archives, and turned towards a more sculptural engagement with the body in its relation to discourses around identity and historicity.
