NADA Curated by Catherine Taft

The artistic practice of Carlos A. Mora, expressed in media such as drawing, installation, painting, and sculpture, strains the existing relationships between remote pasts and their material vestiges, surviving to the present; like pre-Hispanic architecture, to speculate on the ecological contradictions inherent today. The artist’s work, as an archeology of visual knowledge, uses the remains of material culture not so much to apprehend the past, but to project a speculative image of the plots of ecology from its fictional and political dimension that are to come, stalking us.

Starting from a sculptural crossroads, the work Ōllamalīztli (Ball game in Nahuatl) reworks a court used in the pre-Hispanic ball game to represent our contemporaneity through other materials, signified for example in the red light that neon loves as a symbol of fire and its destructive force. Unlike an archaeological artifact of yesteryear, in their materiality and investiture these other artifacts present a critique of the tensions and contradictions of the global capitalist world, incompatible with the preservation of the natural world.