Vera Mota

Vera Mota (Porto, 1982) has a degree in Fine-Arts – Sculpture (2000-2005) and a Master’s in Contemporary Artistic Practices (2006-2008) from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto. The artist lives works in Porto.

Her artistic practice is revealed mainly through sculpture, drawing and performance, taking advantage of the breadth and permeability that these disciplines offer. With regular public presentations since 2005, her work calls for a strong material component, in a process in which her body asserts itself as an almost always indispensable agent. Performance thus emerges as a means of production, composition or even staging, promoting and equating the participation of the body as a generative methodology and axis for conceptual formulations.

Using a wide range of materials – marble, iron, bronze, textiles, leather, glass, paper – in large scale, watertight sculptures, as well as temporary installations, she brings out the properties of these materials, whose specificities end up being decisive in defining the expression that the works take on. In sculpture as in drawing, this acting body imprints its gestures and transits.

More recently, her work has been centered around the politics of the body and features a sculptural animism that calls for other perspectives of the body, other bodies and materialities, seeking to stage processes of transfiguration, declassification of functions and transference between organic and inorganic, geological and biological bodies, examples of which are her most recent solo exhibitions, namely “SEM CORPO/ DISEMBODIED” (Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto).

As part of exhibitions and performance programmes, her work has also been presented at Galeria Municipal do Porto (Oporto, Portugal); MACE – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas (Elvas, Portugal); Matadero (Madrid, Spain); Ireland’s Biennial (Limerick, Ireland) and SESC (São Paulo, Brazil); among others.

Her work is part of important collections such as Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection – CACE; Serralves Foundation Collection; PLMJ Collection; António Cachola Collection– MACE; Ilídio Pinho Collection and Centro de Arte Oliva – Norlinda and José Lima Collection.