Víctor Mortales: Language is a Place
January 17 - March 7, 2026
Curated by Hannah Sloan
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 17, 2025 from 3pm-5pm
Mike Kelley Gallery at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291
Press Release
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is pleased to present Language is a Place, a solo exhibition by Oaxaca-based visual artist Víctor Mortales, on view January 17 through March 7, 2026, in the Mike Kelley Gallery. Curated by Hannah Sloan, this exhibition marks Mortales’ first solo presentation in the United States. An artist reception will take place on Saturday, January 17, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.
Language is a Place exists at the intersection of literature and visual art, asking how language functions as both a bridge and a gap between inner thought and lived experience. The exhibition takes its conceptual starting point from the book Language is a Place: 14 Voices that Change Language to Explore Literature and Life in Different Contexts, edited by Gris Tormenta in Mexico. The publication gathers reflections by writers who explore the conditions, transformations, and possibilities of language across cultures and identities.
Translating this literary inquiry into material form, Mortales transforms written phrases into tactile works using wool, cotton, and mosquito net. Spanish and English texts become texture; words are reimagined as physical connections, woven into abstract forms that invite close looking and embodied engagement. Rather than illustrating language, the works ask viewers to experience it spatially and sensorially—as something that can be held, traversed, and felt.
The exhibition’s central series of textile works are uniformly sized at 16 x 14 inches and employ red thread against black and white textile surfaces. While the format remains consistent, the proportion of black within each piece shifts from work to work, suggesting the gradual rise of a tide or the encroaching movement of a sea. This slow visual progression introduces a temporal and spatial rhythm across the series, reinforcing the exhibition’s meditation on language as something that accumulates, advances, and reshapes the terrain it inhabits.
The exhibition also includes a series of face masks, sewn and embroidered with words and symbols that further extend Mortales’ investigation into language and embodiment. Concealing and reshaping the face, the masks operate as sites where language both obscures and reveals. Phrases such as “being two things being confused and ambivalent” and “Volver a nombrar las cosas, volver a comprender la existencia” surface as poetic fragments—gestures toward the instability of meaning and the ongoing act of naming as a way to understand existence.
The exhibition creates a restrained, abstract environment that invites viewers to consider language as a shared terrain we all move through. In Mortales’ work, language emerges as a place that can both confine and liberate, shaping how we understand ourselves, others, and the spaces we inhabit.
Mortales’ practice is informed by his background in linguistics and his ongoing investigation into the relationships between language, space, and temporality. Working across photography, drawing, video, textiles, and performative actions, his site-specific installations foreground the ephemeral nature of creative processes and blur the boundaries between image, word, and territory.
The exhibition will also feature a performance by the artist, Pernocta (Overnight: A Body at Rest Is a Potential Image), which extends Mortales’ long-standing exploration of rest, dwelling, and image-making. Originating from a photographic project carried out over 31 consecutive nights in Mexico City—later culminating in the photobook Nivi Ve’e—Pernocta reclaims that experience by transferring it from physical space to the body itself. Performed within Beyond Baroque’s book store, the act of rest becomes a provocation, activating the site as a convergence of memory, language, and imagined paths. Here, rest is understood not as inactivity, but as a generative state from which new images and meanings emerge. The performance will take place Thursday, February 19 at 7:30pm.
Mike Kelley Gallery at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291. Press inquiries can be directed to Diana Fitzgibbon at diana@hannahsloan.com.
/ About
Víctor Mortales (born 1985, Oaxaca, Mexico) is a visual artist with a background in linguistics whose site-specific practice explores the ephemeral nature of creative processes and the connections between space, language, and materiality. He has studied at the Academia de San Carlos, the International Center of Photography, Centro de la Imagen, and Centro de las Artes de San Agustín. Since 2011, Mortales has taught photography and exhibited in independent spaces and institutions including the Museum of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City, Museu de Arte da Bahia, Brazil, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Brazil, Centro de la Imagen in Oaxaca, Mexico, the Museum of Oaxacan Painters, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca.
His photobook Nivi Ve’e was shortlisted for the 2022 Fotobook Festival Kassel Dummy Award. Mortales has worked as a cultural manager for Projeto Ativa and contributed to Coati, the final project of architect Lina Bordi, in Salvador, Bahia. He has completed artist residencies in Mexico and the United States, including a 2024 residency at Art Division in Los Angeles. In 2017, he co-founded the independent exhibition space Casa Garita. He was the winner of the 1st Individual Exhibition call at the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín in 2023. He currently lives and works in Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Oaxaca.