Vera Mota

Performing Matters, flesh hues, skeletal forms

Matter, Immediacy, and Embodied Experience

Vera Mota’s (b. 1982; lives and works in Porto) practice is rooted in performance, sculpture, and drawing. Her work summons a strong material component, where performance emerges as a means of production, composition, or even staging. “The body is a primary reference of action […]. Her works hint at things, without reproducing them. The spine is quoted, the hand appears, shapes reminiscent of lungs, the headrests, sometimes lying on the floor, sometimes hanging on the wall, allude to postures, while other objects have an inherent prosthetic quality. It is this sensation of familiarity and strangeness that never lets go—a play between organic and inorganic, the anthropomorphic and strict geometry, the repellent and the beguiling, the coincidental and the calculated” as Merle Radtke puts it.

Performing Matters, flesh hues, skeletal forms, the first monograph on Vera Mota’s creative practice, presents a comprehensive survey of her output of the past decade. The book invites the reader to immerse themselves in her thinking, her sculpting, her