Víctor Mortales:
Overnight: A Body at Rest Produces Images
Performance: February 19, 2026, 7:30-9:30 PM
The Bookstore at Beyond Baroque
681 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291
As part of his current exhibition Language is a Place, Víctor Mortales will present Overnight: A Body at Rest Produces Images, a live performance that extends his ongoing investigation into rest, dwelling, and image-making. The work emerges from a photographic project carried out over thirty-one consecutive nights in Mexico City, later realized as the photobook Nivi Ve’e. In this performance, Mortales reclaims that durational experience by shifting it from a physical site to the body itself, treating rest as both subject and method.
Staged within Beyond Baroque’s bookstore, Overnight activates the space as a site of convergence, where memory, language, and imagined trajectories overlap. Rest is framed not as stillness or withdrawal, but as a generative state—one capable of producing new images, meanings, and forms of attention. Through this quiet yet charged gesture, Mortales invites viewers to consider how presence, duration, and the body can operate as living archives within the spaces we inhabit.
/ Artist’s Statement
My artistic practice has long centered on dwelling and movement—the andar—as modes of inhabiting and understanding place. From the 31-night photographic journey through Mexico City that became the book Nivi Ve’e, my focus now turns to the essential, generative pauses within that movement: the lapsarian moments of rest. In these intervals, the body ceases its travel, yet the mind actively assimilates, produces memories, and prepares to awaken into a new space. Rest is not emptiness, but a potent, formative threshold.
The performance Overnight ritualizes this state. Within Beyond Baroque, a temple of language, my resting body becomes a conduit, referencing art-historical poses of vulnerability, contemplation, and surrender—from the Shroud of Turin and Rodin’s Thinker to Millais’s Ophelia and the raised arms of Goya’s Third of May rebel. These echoes extend to local forms like the Lady of the Lake statue in Echo Park and the primal sun-arms of cave paintings, collectively mapping a silent archaeology of the recumbent form.
This curated stillness is an intentional vessel. André Bazin’s insight into the “mummification of change” is foundational here. He located the origin of image-making in the embalming ritual, a desire to rescue being from time by fixing its appearance. Similarly, a body at rest is an attempt to still time’s flow. It becomes both a photograph (a captured instant), a sculpture (a form occupying space), and a potential image in the mind of the observer. The ritualistic use of a mask further abstracts the specific into the universal, inviting the audience past mere identification.
Accompanied by the experimental soundscape “Peligro,” the performance frames this rest as a charged, productive space. It is an act of becoming-image, not through doing, but through being. By presenting my body in this suspended, art-historically resonant state, I aim to trigger a parallel, internal image-making process in the viewer. The true “performance” culminates not on the floor, but in the silent cinema of the audience’s memory and imagination, awakened by a body at rest.