This photograph documents Sierra's body painted as tribute to both Afro-Colombian and pre-Columbian cultures—the dual heritage of Caribbean Colombia that official histories have often marginalized or romanticized while erasing. Sierra's methodology of positioning himself in "erotic and suggestive positions" while bearing these cultural markings performs crucial work: it refuses the desexualization of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian bodies in anthropological discourse while simultaneously claiming these cultural heritages for queer Caribbean subjects. The painted body becomes site where ancestry and desire, tradition and contemporary queer consciousness, historical trauma and present pleasure coexist without resolution. By documenting these performances photographically, Sierra creates archives of embodied cultural tribute that center the homoerotic gaze rather than the colonial ethnographic one.
Body Paint tribute to the Afro and pre-Columbian cultures, taking erotic and suggestive poses such as reading among others.
Afro-Colombian and Indigenous heritage embodied through painted performance—erotic positioning claiming dual cultural legacy for queer Caribbean body and desire. Nude photography documentation. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.
Erotic Position Performance - Untitled IV, 2016 by Jose Sierra
Untitled IV, 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.”
