Dot Fiftyone Gallery is proud to present “Neither one nor the other, but a wound”, an exhibition by New York-based Colombian artist Camilo Godoy. Curated by Angelica Arbelaez, this exhibition showcases a bold exploration of historical and contemporary social divides.
Neither one nor the other, but a wound features new work and recent photographs by New York-based artist Camilo Godoy. For his first solo exhibition in Miami, Godoy furthers his research into forms of collective movement and choreography through performance, photography, and sculpture.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a video titled “Renacemos a cada instante” (We are reborn at every moment), which documents a recent performance by Godoy with performers Reginald Thomas Brown, Iliana Penichet-Ramírez, Gabriel Reyes, and Sasha Ono at the New Museum in New York. The work depicts an ensemble of dancers moving through a dense fog in an evocatively lit space. Led by the sound of a cello, the dancers perform choreographies based on improvisation and inspired by mourning practices that celebrate the cycles of life and death. Their bodies move with ease, making gentle gestures that ebb, sink, and fall away. For the presentation at Dot Fiftyone Gallery, exhibition space will be similarly engulfed in a yellow-orange-hued light, inviting visitors to feel immersed in the work.
The exhibition will also include three photographs from Godoy’s series, What did they actually see?. The haunting images depict a lone figure making dramatic poses in near complete darkness. The series reckons with the historical impact of prejudices advanced by Christian missionaries against Black and Indigenous peoples of the Americas during the 17th and 18th centuries. Godoy studied written accounts and anthropological records that described ritual dances performed by native communities near present-day Colombia in a pejorative way. With this series, he photographed himself attempting to imagine what colonizers may have witnessed based on their written descriptions. Godoy’s photographic interpretations of these ritualistic acts offer a corrective and regards them with unequivocal reverence.
Neither one nor the other, but a wound takes its title from a line in the memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras: “We were a brown people, mestizo. European men had arrived on the continent and violated Indigenous women, and that was our origin: neither Native nor Spanish, but a wound.” In this excerpt, Rojas Contreras recounts her family’s ancestry as deeply marked by the legacies of violence enacted by European colonizers towards Indigenous communities in Colombia. Godoy similarly reflects upon the repercussions of these histories and continues to create a singular body of work that recognizes the importance of embodied knowledge in tending to these inter-generational wounds.
