Carlos Martiel at Steve Turner
Donasia Tillery | October 26, 2022
In her paradigm-shifting text Ghostly Matters, cultural theorist and sociologist Avery F. Gordon employs the concept of haunting to describe “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known.” Unlike trauma, which is transfixed to a moment in time, haunting is a dynamic entanglement with what once was, rupturing illusions of linear time and putting the past within our reach. This notion of haunting feels especially resonant as I enter Cuban artist Carlos Martiel’s exhibition Peso, a multimedia meditation on the weight of Black embodiment, in which—through acts of corporeal vulnerability and endurance—Martiel crafts an aesthetic language for how intergenerational social violence manifests in the body.
