Ventura Profana (Salvador, 1993) is a missionary pastor, singer, writer, composer, and visual artist. Her work, at the same time artistic and missionary, announces infinite possibilities of life, especially for trans and travesti people. It is a mission that partakes in what Ventura calls the transmutation theology, a line of thought whose aim is to transform that which is destined to Black, indigenous, and queer bodies. As the artist affirms: “if they give us hideous oblivion, death, pain and despise, with equivalent intensity we will make vines sprout”. This exhibition presents the following videos for the first time: A maior obra de saneamento [The Biggest Sanitation Enterprise] (2024), O poder da trava que ora [The Power of the Praying Trava] (2021), Procure vir antes do inverno [Try to Come before Winter] (2021) e Para ver as meninas e nada mais nos braços [To See the Little Girls and Nothing Else in Arms] (2024).
In the first video, A maior obra de saneamento, destruction is taken as the starting point for a reflection on the briefness of mundane things and on death as a new beginning, mediated through faith and the act of praying. The latter is present in O poder da trava que ora, in which the artist appears prostrate, mysterious and undressed, in a position which suggests, at the same time, prayer and pleasure. In the third video, Procure vir antes do inverno, the artist stablishes a dialog with her grandmother on the obstacles of choosing a religious path. The conversation takes place while we see Ventura, Bianca Kalutor, and Rainha F. building their own temple together. In the last work, Para ver as meninas e nada mais nos braços, the same feeling of sisterhood is present in the sequence of images celebrating the love, life, and existence of travesti people.
Video Room: Ventura Profana is curated by David Ribeiro, Supervisor of Mediation and Public Programs.
Throughout 2024, the exhibition program of the Video Room will take part in the cycle of Queer Histories at MASP, including works by Masi Mamani/Bartolina Xixa, Tourmaline, Ventura Profana, Kang Seung Lee, and Manauara Clandestina.
Travesti: formerly pejorative term used in Latin America to designate people assigned male at birth, but who identify as women. It has been adopted by this own community and transformed into a positive, gender-affirming term.
Trava: popular slang for travesti people which has gone through a similar change in its meaning and usage.