Jota Mombaça: A Method/Grieving Time

A METHOD/GRIEVING TIME is a site-responsive exhibition in which Jota Mombaça looks into the architecture and history of the museum’s building — the former US Embassy in The Netherlands — to unfold a questioning of imperial tools of temporal control and migratory legislation enforcement. This is Jota Mombaça’s first solo show in The Netherlands.

The exhibition revisits a 2017 contextual painting, titled ‘The Colonial Wound Still Hurts, vol. 7: Honey Baby’, composed of the artist’s marriage and migration papers scratched and stained by her blood. The relationship between colonial bondage and migratory policies becomes patent as Mombaça looks into her path from Brazil to Portugal through these blooded documents, marked by the ever-colonial geopolitical continuum and seemingly post-colonial discontinuities. The work is expanded into a series of newly commissioned gestures spread across the first floor of the building.

On the second floor, the artist departs from her position towards a more transversal approach, involving a study of the poetry carved by former detainees of Angel Island’s Migration Station, an insular detention center for immigrants located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Run for around 30 years in the first half of the 20th century, the Detention Barracks were first abandoned and later transformed into a museum that critically looks into the history of US Imperial border politics, namely in relation to its role in the Chinese Exclusion Act and its effects on the Chinese-American community.

A newly commissioned video series, filmed in San Francisco, will be presented along with a series of site-specific installations that continue the poetic reflections on architectural confinement, imperial imaginaries, and arrested timelines found in the poetry carved by mostly anonymous Chinese immigrants on the walls of the detention facility on Angel Island. The office-like rooms that form the exhibition space offer a privileged standpoint from which to convey these reflections. In this sense, Mombaça’s work will investigate the architectural continuity between spaces of power and spaces of powerlessness, attempting to expose what lies within the imperial imaginaries of confinement and movement control.

A METHOD/GRIEVING TIME continues Mombaça’s critical engagement with the politics of migration in contemporary society, through formal, personal, and contextual gestures that attempt to remix a variety of positions into a consistent critique of the role played by Imperial entities such as the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal and Brazil in the making of a global order that continues to arrest timelines and map territories so as to confine the life possibilities of the living. 

Jota Mombaça (1991) is a Brazilian artist known for their interdisciplinary work that spans writing, research, performance art, and critical theory. Born in Natal, Brazil, Mombaça studied Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, where she developed a keen interest in queer studies and critical theory. This academic background significantly informs their artistic practice. Her art has been featured in prominent exhibitions worldwide, including the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennial, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, the 10th Berlin Biennale, Ludwig Forum, Aachen 2023, the Venice Biennial 2022 and 2024, Fondation Beyeler 2024, and Kunsthalle Wien 2024. Jota Mombaça is an alumna of Rijksacademie, Amsterdam.

For more information, please contact: info@westdenhaag.nl or +31(0)70.3925359