JOTA CASTRO

Born 1965 in Yurimaguas, Peru. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Jota Castro Presidenzia Italiana 2/07/03, 2003, video, 6 mins. Courtesy the artist and Uplands Gallery, Melbourne

Jota Castro, a Peruvian-born artist, left his career in diplomacy in the late 1990s to devote himself to his art; in his words: ‘I picked up art because I couldn’t stand lying.’ Today, Castro lives and works in Brussels, working across a range of media including video, installation, photography, performance and sculpture. The raw truth of Castro’s art reveals a political activist at work, seeking to expose what he regards as the unbalanced mechanisms that exist in society.

In 2005, Castro staged a performance protest at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, entitled Discrimination Day, in which he held a sign above a crowded public space indicating separate entry points for ‘BLANCS/WHITES’ and ‘AUTRES/OTHERS’. Affixed to the entry of the museum was a banner announcing ‘Discrimination Day’ in letters painted in the French national colours. Vigilant security made it difficult and uncomfortable for ‘whites’ to enter the show, while ‘others’ walked through with ease. The work highlighted blatant police discrimination against citizens of colour – a phenomenon the French call délit de faciès, or ‘facial crime’ – people who are never usually subject to such actions suddenly found themselves the object of prejudice.

For his work Mortgage (2009), Castro hung nooses crafted out of dollar bills and rope to represent the unfolding suicide of the world’s financial and economic system. The word ‘mortgage’ also comes from the old French, meaning ‘dead pledge’; in this way, the work contemplates the individual suicides that a mortgage represents for average citizens. In Tricky (2009), two brand-new soccer balls (one adult-size, the other child-size) are wrapped in barbed wire, creating a work similar in menace and tension, and forming a warning out of these seemingly innocent objects. A common theme throughout Castro’s work is the belief that an individual’s race and social origin are – unjustly – determining factors in their social life, possibilities and aspirations. After resolving to explain the phenomenon of transculturation – ‘in a blatant and visual manner’ – he made a series of photographs, entitled ‘No More No Less’ (2006), which depicted cultural symbols of the West, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, protruding from the anus of a male model. The work is a flagrant interrogation of countries that hold, or once held, power over the rest of the world.

Presidenzia Italiana 2/07/03 (2003), which will be shown in the 17th Biennale of Sydney, is a ten-minute video referencing the notorious exchange between Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and the German socialist Martin Schulz at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, during which Berlusconi famously suggested that Schulz would be perfectly cast and better suited as a Nazi concentration camp guard in a forthcoming film. This exchange has been absurdly scored as if it were an eighteenth-century Italian opera sung by French soprano Maud Gnidzaz. Jota Castro’s critical artistic practice, biting and humorous in turns, seeks to expose, criticise and break down oppressive political and social structures.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Jota Castro’, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Germany
2008 ‘La palabra de los mudos’, performance, Redondo Beach, Lima, Peru
2006 ‘No More No Less’, Galería Oliva Arauna, Madrid, Spain
2005 ‘Exposition universelle 1’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
2005 ‘Taking part’, Stedelijk Museum’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 Festival Estrella Levante SOS 4.8, Murcia, Spain
2009 ‘The Fear Society’, collateral event, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
2009 ‘Art, Architecture and Landscape’, 2nd Biennial of the Canary Islands, Tenerife, Spain
2008–09 ‘All’s Fair in Art and War: Envisioning Conflict’, 21c Museum, Louisville, USA
2007 ‘We Are Your Future’, 2nd Moscow Biennale, Russia

Selected Bibliography

‘Jota Castro’, Flash Art, Italian edition, no. 243, December 2003–January 2004
Ana Finel Honigman, ‘Jota Castro’, Artforum.com, 20 February 2009
Bettina von Krogemann, ‘Du siehst, wohin Du siehst, nur Eitelkeit auf Erden’, WELT ONLINE, 22 November 2008: www.welt.de
Spunk Seipel, ‘Das Wesen der Menschenwürde – Zur Einzelausstellung von Jota Castro’, Kunst Magazin Berlin, issue 0902, 2009, pp. 6–9
Jérôme Sans, Jota Castro, exhibition catalogue, Paris Musées, Palais de Tokyo, 2005