Untitled VIII represents Sierra's ongoing practice of painting his body as tribute to Afro-Colombian and pre-Columbian cultures, then documenting these performances in photographs that portray him in erotic and suggestive positions. The work functions as ancestral body archive—preserving cultural aesthetic traditions through living performance rather than museum objectification. Sierra's insistence on the erotic dimension is politically significant: it refuses the purification of Indigenous and African cultural practices that colonialism demanded and that contemporary folklorization continues. The homoerotic gaze Sierra applies to his own painted body suggests that desire, pleasure, and sexuality were always part of these cultural traditions, even when colonial and post-colonial narratives erased them. By merging himself as "subject of aesthetic creation" with ancestral body painting practices, Sierra creates photographs that honor the past while insisting on the queer present's right to that inheritance.
Body Paint tribute to the Afro and pre-Columbian cultures, taking erotic and suggestive poses such as reading among others.
Ancestral cultural traditions archived through erotic painted body performance—Afro-Colombian and pre-Columbian heritage claimed via homoerotic self-representation and desire. Nude photography documentation. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.
Erotic Cultural Photography - Untitled VIII, 2016 by Jose Sierra
Untitled VIII, 2016
From the Sin Título Series
Archival Pigment Print
Limited Edition
Unframed
Jose Sierra (b. 1991 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia) obtained his Master in Fine Arts from the University Institute of Fine Arts and Science of Bolivar (UNIBAC) in 2012 with a body of work titled Anti-Personnel Grids, which has since exhibited in different locales of Colombia. Shortly after, he was commissioned by the Colombian Ministry of Culture alongside the artist collective Si Nos Pagan Boys to participate in an urban art exposition titled, La Muerte Se Va de Vacaciones (Death is Going on Vacation) that was executed as a reaction to the traditionalism of Cartagena. In 2014, he exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Cartagena and in La Presentacion Casa Museo Arte y Cultura. He then exhibited in the Cultural Center Ciudad Movil in 2016 with a body of work created in collaboration with the Colombian photographer, Camo. In the same year, he was nominated for the International Luxembourg Art Prize for his recent work Self-Portrait. Sierra’s ongoing body of work continues to be based around his self-representation from which he addresses a homoerotic gaze through the configuration of abject staged environments that he merges himself within as “a subject of aesthetic creation.”
