Institute of the Arts and Sciences
100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, CA
P (831) 502-7252
Email ias@ucsc.edu
October 2, 2026 - March 7, 2027
12 - 5 p.m. Wednesday - Sunday
(Closed Monday and Tuesday)
Carlos Motta’s When Time Stands Still— the Colombian-born artist’s second solo exhibition with the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz— features artworks created since 2025 which explore the unsettling experience of living in a time that seems violently stuck on repeat. The selection of video works, sculpture, installations, and drawings on view together form a critical aesthetic historiography into how the past, mired in conquest, colonization, and marginalization, shapes the present. More than an indictment of Euro-American political and cultural history, the works on view also ask how art can act as a rallying call to those who have been forced to the margins.
When Time Stands Still is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.
Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic communities, challenging normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work has been the focus of several survey exhibitions, including Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2025); Carlos Motta: Stigmata at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) (2023); Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2022); Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) and more. Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph, Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms, was published by SKIRA in June 2020. He is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
