Pêdra Costa: Seduction at a crossroads

Opening: Mon, Nov 14, 19:00
Venue: ARTISTIC BOKEH
Admission free

“Seduction at a crossroads” is a new performance of Pêdra Costa informed by the technologies of queer bodies and spiritual knowledge. This piece involves codes of seduction from a queer body from the global South, showing and criticizing the concept of beauty in heteronormative society. It does so by using the concepts and  embodiment of pharmacopornography by Paul B. Preciado.

This work is based on Pomba-giras, female spirits that incorporate mediums in the Umbanda, a syncretic Brazilian religion, heritage from my mother. Those spirits work on love, seduction and sex, and the crossroads are the space to offer gifts for them.

At the same time, Pêdra talks in pajubá-deutsch, a language between pajubá, used by trans women in Brazil in the past to protect themselves that mixed Yoruba and Portuguese, and spread into the queer community today, and Deutsch, the German language. Pajubá-deutsch is based on the concept of mestiza and cultural hybridity from Gloria Anzaldúa's work on intersectional difference in order to articulate a politics of coalition against the exclusion of alterity.

Pêdra Costa is a Brazilian performance artist and anthropologist. S/he is currently doing a Diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and working with queer immigrant artists internationally. Her work is informed by the aesthetics of post-porn and an investigation about decolonial concepts.

The exhibition is part of the program UNO, DOIS, DREI… AN EXHIBITION IN THREE INSTALLMENTS a Mz* Baltazar’s Lab curatorial project in collaboration with RIAT Research Institute for Arts and Technology at Q21 in MuseumsQuartier. For this exhibition series Patricia J. Reis and Anna T. have invited artists focusing on language in a multitude of ways. Being based in a place that has been so divided in the context of immense sociopolitical changes, while becoming more multi-cultural, the curators wanted to look into language as a technology of communicating, connecting, and coming together. The exhibition series examines the visual language of colonialism (and who or what becomes illegal), the human and machine language and its threshold of function and dysfunction, and the embodied language of a queer migrant body that opens up and connects with other bodies and spirits alike.
Mz* Baltazar's curatorial viewpoint brings together artists from different media and backgrounds that speak to the diversity of the creative hub that is Vienna. Mz* Baltazar's Lab further aims at highlighting the lengthy process of artistic practice as research in the framework of social and political themes, such as migration, Eurocentrism, cyborgs, queerness, and the overarching theme of language.
We are happy to present Mariel Rodríguez, Isabella Kohlhuber, and Pêdra Costa in a series of exhibitions running from August to December 2016 at the space of Artistic Bokeh in Q21.

Image: © Pêdra Costa

<link http: www.riat.ac.at>www.riat.ac.at