Gasworks presents the first UK solo exhibition by New York-based artist Pedro Neves Marques.
Pedro Neves Marques is a visual artist, filmmaker and writer working across theory and speculative fiction. Informed by anthropology, his films and writings trace the histories of colonialism past and present, while weaving a constant dialogue with contemporary issues of political ecology, science and technology. In particular, his work often engages with indigenous struggles and Amerindian cosmologies in Brazil, where most of his films are produced.
For his first UK solo exhibition, Neves Marques presents a body of works based on his research in a laboratory in São Paulo that breeds genetically-engineered mosquitoes. Ranging from analogue film and digital animation to poetry, the exhibition features new and existing works that interrogate the laboratory as a place that defines the biopolitics of the 21st Century.
The exhibition examines the trauma of biological warfare against the backdrop of the Zika virus epidemic. Blood and sex hormones are revealed as agents of power that operate with extraordinary force in our daily lives at the molecular level. Drawing on the literary traditions of horror and feminist science fiction, Neves Marques invites the viewer to speculate on the future of love, sex, care and intimacy in the midst of the current rise of authoritarian politics.
