MIAMI, FLA.- The Pérez Art Museum Miami opened a new solo exhibition by the Portuguese artist, filmmaker, and writer Pedro Neves Marques. The exhibition, Pedro Neves Marques: A Mordida, is on view from December 4, 2018 through July 28, 2019.

A Mordida, or “The Bite,” is Neves Marques’ first solo museum presentation in the United States. Presented as an audio-visual installation, it features the premiere of new films commissioned by PAMM, digital animations, and a musical piece by London-based musician Fraencis. This exhibition is a fitting introduction for US audiences to Neves Marques’ work, bringing together explorations that address clashes among politics of nature, technology, and gender. In his practice, science fiction and speculative storytelling are employed as key tools used to examine the history of colonization as well as the possibility of non-Western futures.

The new films, which are based on a research completed at a genetically modified mosquito factory in São Paulo, Brazil, include both fictional and documentary elements, veering between the present and an imagined future. The biological epidemic of the Zika virus, being combatted partly through the use of the mutated mosquitoes, becomes an analogue to the rise of reactionary conservatism in Brazilian politics, which reached a new zenith with the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro. We follow the protagonists—a man, a woman, and a transgender woman—of these films through these two crises, drawing lines between psychological and bodily horrors, political and medical crises, the sterile heteronormativity of the lab and the assault on reproductive autonomy in the halls of power. While all these tensions express themselves in personal relations—as a retreat or a refuge from the crisis—the films nonetheless point to intimacy and care as possible futures beyond the constraints of a binary mentality.

Pedro Neves Marques: A Mordida is organized by PAMM Assistant Curator Jennifer Inacio.

Pedro Neves Marques (b. 1984, Lisbon) received an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Fine Arts from Universidade de Lisboa. He has had solo presentations of his work at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon; e-flux, New York (with Mariana Silva); and EDP Foundation, Lisbon (with André Romão). His work has been presented in group presentations including 2018 New Museum Triennial, SculptureCenter, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Anthology Film Archives (all in New York); Jeu de Paume, and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Tate Modern, London; V-A-C Foundation, and PAV, Italy; Casa do Povo, São Paulo; Sursock Art Museum, Beirut; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Fondación Botín, Spain; and Serralves Museum for Contemporary Art, and MAAT, Lisbon, and Oporto.

Neves Marques is the editor of The Forest and the School: Where to Sit at the Dinner Table? (2015), an anthology on Brazilian Antropofagia from an anthropological perspective, and author of two short story collections, most recently Morrer na América (2017). He is cofounder of www.inhabitants-tv.org, an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting. Neves Marques lives and works in New York.