Acts of Faith, Acts of Love: Carlos Motta’s Pleas of Resistance at MACBA in Barcelona
Queer histories, colonial legacies, and the politics of desire in a groundbreaking exhibition
On March 29, I visited MACBA in Barcelona to experience Pleas of Resistance, an exhibition by Colombian artist Carlos Motta. This is not a quiet, contemplative show—it is a visceral, poetic, and unapologetically political act of defiance. Through photography, video, installations, and collaborations, Motta dismantles the narratives of religion, medicine, and law that have long sought to define—and confine—queer bodies and desires. Over more than twenty-five years of work, he has built a practice that is at once historical and speculative, deeply personal yet collective, and always resistant to the violence of categorization.
Motta’s work engages directly with the colonial archives that have shaped Western understandings of sexuality. Christianity, wielded as an ideological weapon by the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, imposed rigid categories of morality and deviance. Pre-Hispanic homoeroticism, erased through forced conversion and violence, is reimagined in this exhibition through acts of inversion—a deliberate reclaiming of identities that were outlawed, silenced, or forgotten.
A trilogy of film essays, archival photographs, and sculptural objects reconstruct the stories of those who lived outside colonial norms. A video performance featuring Motta’s own body challenges the religious stigmatization of desire, exposing the contradictions within Catholic doctrine. In these works, he does not just uncover hidden histories—he actively rewrites them, positioning queer existence not as an aberration, but as an enduring force of resistance.
Throughout his career, Motta has explored the body as a site of knowledge and power. In We Who Feel Differently (2012), a multimedia installation, he interrogates how LGBTQIA2S+ identities have been politically mobilized over time. This space pays tribute to decades of queer activism, particularly in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, with the inverted pink triangle serving as a counter-monument to stigma. His work foregrounds those traditionally deemed “sick” or “deviant,” reclaiming their histories as acts of love and defiance.
In an era still reckoning with pandemics and the politics of care, Motta’s work asks urgent questions: Whose bodies are seen as valuable? Who is allowed to grieve, to desire, to be remembered? His art insists that radical love and collective mourning are acts of resistance.
One of the exhibition’s most striking aspects is how it reclaims religious iconography. In Acts of Faith, Love as Resistance, Motta examines how colonial institutions imposed binary and exclusionary definitions of sexuality. He brings to life those who were condemned as sodomites, “hermaphrodites,” or heretics, reanimating their stories in ways that are both historical and speculative.
Paintings and sculptures in the exhibition reference the figure of the devil as a fallen angel—traditionally used by the Church to represent non-normative sexualities. But rather than reinforcing that stigma, Motta subverts it. In his queer mythology, the demonized become divine. Sodomites, intersex figures, and trans-interspecies bodies are not shamed but celebrated. These “blasphemous” images transcend rigid categories, blurring the boundaries between human and non-human, history and imagination, resistance and devotion.
What makes Pleas of Resistance so powerful is its refusal to conform to historical narratives, to Western binaries, to institutional frameworks. Motta’s work reminds us that queer justice is social justice, and that acts of faith, love, and defiance have always been—and will always be—revolutionary.
The exhibition runs from February 21, 2025, to October 26, 2025, at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), located at Plaça dels Àngels, 1, 08001 Barcelona, Spain.
Visiting Information:
• Free entry is available on Saturdays after 4:00 PM, but you must reserve a free ticket online through the museum’s website in advance.
• Regular tickets can be purchased directly at MACBA or online.
For anyone in Barcelona, this is an exhibition that demands to be seen. It is unsettling, provocative, and ultimately hopeful—a testament to the power of art to challenge, remember, and resist.
Acts of faith…haven’t we had enough of that?