Artist Camilo Godoy presents a newly-commissioned performance and series of public engagement programs based on mourning practices and the resilience found in bodily joy and pleasure.
Camilo Godoy, Choreographic Studies (Giselle), 2015-2022 (detail). Photo: Luis Corzo. Courtesy the artist and PROXYCO Gallery
New Museum Get Directions
As the New Museum’s 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence, Camilo Godoy will create a performance exploring movement, breathing, and mourning practices. The title of his residency is borrowed from an embroidered work made by the queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión in 1995, the year before he died of AIDS-related complications. Godoy adjusts Centurión’s title Renazco a cada instante (I am reborn at every moment) to “renacemos a cada instante” (we are reborn at every moment) to emphasize collective celebrations of life and death. Using the Museum’s theater as a space for rehearsal, dialogue, and collaboration, Godoy invites the public to join his evolving process through interactive workshops, an open rehearsal, and sessions with teenagers participating in the Museum’s NewMu Teens program.
This residency draws on Godoy’s Choreographic Studies, a personal archive and a constellation of collaged images that represent the human body performing gestures of eroticism, ecstasy, grief, and pain. Godoy sources the images from historical archives, art history, pornography, and medical materials. He intersperses them with photographs of himself and other dancers rehearsing and arranges the images in sequences of evocative poses that he treats as dance notations or instructions. Taken together, this archive presents an alternate history of emotional life, surfacing queer experiences of death, intimacy, and sexual expression.
Through his collaborative and improvisatory choreographic process, Godoy will draw inspiration from this archive to develop a new performance based on mourning practices and the resilience found in bodily joy and pleasure.
“Camilo Godoy: renacemos a cada instante,” the New Museum’s 2023-2024 artist-in-residence program, is organized by Alethea Rockwell, Keith Haring Director of Education and Public Engagement, Gi (Ginny) Huo, Assistant Director of Education, and Austin D Bowes, Public Programs Coordinator. Performance production by Derek Wright, Senior Production Manager. With project support from Laura Hakel, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camilo Godoy (b. Bogotá, Colombia) is a New York-based artist whose practice spans photography, performance, pedagogy, and archival production. Godoy has participated in residencies at Movement Research, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Recess Art, SOLARIS, and coleção moraes-barbosa, São Paolo, Brazil. He has exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, OCDChinatown, PROXYCO Gallery, Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá; Moody Center, Houston; UNSW Galleries, Sydney; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito; among others. He has performed at Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, Toronto Biennial, and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt.
ABOUT NEW MUSEUM ARTIST RESIDENCIES
The New Museum’s Artist Residency program supports artists working at the intersections of performance, pedagogy, and participatory art to develop and present new work.
This program foregrounds the Museum’s commitment to the role of partnership and public dialogue in advancing contemporary art practice. Across workshops, conversations, and performances, New Museum Artists-in-Residence have interacted with the community through transdisciplinary methods including dance, storytelling, medicinal dialogue, animation, lectures, musical performances, and installations. Past participants of the program include Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Simone Leigh, Shaun Leonardo, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sable Elyse Smith, Chris E. Vargas, and Ilya Vidrin, among many others.
