Carlos Motta: When Time Stands Still

Carlos Motta’s When Time Stands Still, the artist’s second solo show with the IAS, features new and recent installations, videos, and sculptures highlighting the artist’s preoccupation with the historical and aesthetic productions of difference and marginalization that shape the present.

The selection of artworks in the exhibition explore the unsettling experience of living in a time that seems violently stuck on repeat. Archetypal figures from art history (a fool, a siren, a witness, a victim) reappear in the current moment as containers of time, bringing the past of imperialism, colonization, and displacement into a present marked by the rise of anti-immigration politics, climate injustice, and other forms of disposability. Some works challenge this violent repetition of time. The clock moves, if gruelingly, in an endurance-based video performance, No One, 2025. For forty-six minutes, the artist undertakes to keep his eyes open, witnessing, withstanding, confronting, and resisting the bombardment of images, both historical and otherwise, that normalize harm. In another video work, Gravity, 2024, performers enact rescue carries, supporting each other until they can’t bear the weight. Together, the artworks act as a proposal about how to rethink time—how to slow time—with a poetic and aesthetic cadence that might counter the numbing reverberations of living in the present.

When Time Stands Still is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to create a future free of prisons.