PRESENTATION: Nástio Mosquito-King of Klowns
Nástio Mosquito is a creative protagonist whose artwork, primarily in video and performance, encompasses the invention of multiple personas. Taking inspiration from culture, politics and mass media, the egos we meet interrogate topics such as war, sex, stereotypes, wealth and religion. Mosquito often toys with the ‘correct’ modes of cultural representation and language conventions prevalent in art and culture. The questions are simple yet radical: What do you genuinely care about? What are you willing to die for?
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: M HKA Archive
Nástio Mosquito plays with being charismatic and alienating, funny and scary, entertaining and awkward. With the artist himself embodying each new character, we are constantly asking ourselves who the real Nástio Mosquito is. At any one time, he can be the preacher, the politician or the joker, or any combination thereof. In an era where the art world habitually defines artists and their artworks by their identities, Mosquito’s proposition can be considered something different altogether, as he points us towards a liberated view upon art, expression and society. “King of Klowns”, Mosquito’s first major museum overview exhibition, considers the evolution of his practice from the early 2000s through to today. It includes his excursions into performance, literature and music, as well as his collaborative endeavours. Taking us along a unique journey, we also encounter substantial new productions. the exhibition immerses visitors in Mosquito’s realm of complex characters, in turn demanding of us that we learn to navigate a complex world. Nástio Mosquito’s exhibition commences at its entrance with “I Am Naked” (2005), which is his earliest work presented here. Shot with a night-vision camera, we see a character seemingly trapped or imprisoned within a dark confined space such as a basement or a lock-up. Aware of the camera’s presence, he delivers a tirade towards its lens, his naked male body partially visible. Speaking in Caribbean patois, he is in a state of agitated refusal, denying his captor— and by extension the viewer— the right to pass judgment on him. In this short intense scene, he cries such things as: “I am naked!” and “Am I the only one wanting to feel free?” with such rawness, that the work becomes a proclamation of survival, love, financial precarity, struggle for sanity and emancipation. A key formative work in the career of Nástio Mosquito, the video “Nástia’s Manifesto” (2008) offers us seventeen ingredients for success. Adopting a female alter ego named Nástia, a rather cocky Mosquito, speaking with a hybrid African-Russian accent, talks to us, offering advice points that are a confusing mix of profundity, profanity and pseudo- managerial rhetoric. The Russian name, Nástia, and accent are a nod to Angola’s Cold War-era legacy. The work is inspired by the widely circulated “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth” by renowned designer Bruce Mau. We hear a sort of experimental mantra, bluntly summoning us to either dismiss or follow some of the main social constructs in society, from aspiration, status and leadership, to education, religion and history. Nástia proclaims at both the beginning and end, the whole thing is “hypocritical, ironic” and “do not give a fuck”. “Nástia’s Manifesto” exemplifies Mosquito’s intent to communicate ideas of irreverence and liberation. “Continents” (2010) presents Mosquito delivering three consecutive speeches addressing the continents of Europe, North America and Africa. Each time, a homespun map of each place is attached to a wall in the background. The delivery of the speeches proceeds via an adopted persona that possesses a sort of confident naivety, pronouncing that he has “bought Europe” or “bought the US of A”, then ending somewhat comically by giving up prematurely during the delivery of the last speech, and after some hesitation, stating dismissively “Fuck Africa”— before walking off camera. “3 Continents” offers a surreal reversal of the hegemonic gaze and its lingering imperialistic legacy towards the non-Western world, in a way that is darkly ironic, funny and playfully confounding.
The “A. L. Moore Campaign Room” (2016-19) brings together several artworks and components that draw us into the world of A. L. Moore, the leader of a fictional African nation named Botrovia. Mosquito takes on the role of the politician as a way to consider the formation of nation-states in the image of their (flawed) leaders. A room is filled with furniture, flags and propaganda material, together with video works. A. L. Moore was an entrepreneur ‘by nature’, whose major breakthrough came following the sale of sixteen containers of fake leather wallets produced in China. Here, we see him rehearsing a speech. Peeking behind closed doors, we notice that his motivations are in fact self-interest and criminal deceit, as he seeks to exploit the media and the political system itself. There’s also an aid package of placebo suppository pills attached to a parachute. On their packaging, it reads: ‘Quintuplet Action’, ‘Soothes/Shrinks/Pain Relief/Locates/Awakes God’. Whether to progress or to regress— mind tricks are a politician’s best friend. In contrast, a second video, set at an unspecified time, sees A. L. Moore roaming inside an abandoned building, having seemingly lost his sanity, perhaps after having been crushed by the dog-eat-dog world of politics. “King of Klowns” is (2014) a new film about Nástio Mosquito’s practice, directed by Spanish visual artist Vic Pereiró, and specially made for this overview exhibition. The film embraces the many gestures of Mosquito’s trilogy of musical releases and performances, collectively titled “Empowerment of a Generation”. Manifested over the last ten years, the latter includes the music album S.E.F.A. (acronym for Se Eu Fosse Angolano: ‘If I was Angolan’) and the related performance of the same title; the album Gatuno Eimigrante & Pai De Família (Immigrant Thief and Family Man) and the related performance Respectable Thief, concluding most recently with the album 0. Mosquito has a particularly emotional relationship to music, and King of Klowns offers a self-deprecating look at what he has created. The artist has described this exhibition as his ‘suicide note’, perhaps marking an end to his guise as an artist, and now taking some steps towards new ambitions and horizons. In “Demo Da Cracía” (2013), Nástio Mosquito performs as a pop singer who wants to record a music video, but gradually descends into a drunken stupor. The song is part of Mosquito’s music album S.E.F.A., for which several music videos were made. Full of youthful energy and confidence at first, he dances whilst singing his own song in front of a green screen, only to realise after a while that he cannot live up to what is typically expected of him as an Angolan artist. By the end, he is seemingly so inebriated, that he can only repeatedly holler ‘Angooola!’. Demo Da Cracía invites us to think about what matters when forming relationships with ourselves and our society, and what this might mean for our dreams. “Let Me Read You Roughly” (2023) is a film based on a reading session Nástio Mosquito gave at the Burg Hülshoff— Center for Literature, Münster, in 2023. Mosquito reads a story about how to kill a friend and recites two poems: What resides within me is, above all, weariness by Álvaro de Campos— one of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s numerous pseudonyms— and Defeat, by the Lebanese mystic Khalil Gibran. For the artist, this film is a reflection on everything in which he has failed. Although Mosquito says that he failed in his commitment to ‘debunk identity’, debunking identity seems exactly what he continuously wants to draw us towards. Who knows what ‘the right thing’ to do is? Do you even feel connected to your existence? Do you want to be remembered after you die? What are you willing to die for, rather than seeking to be ‘on the right side of history’? Above all, Mosquito invites us to ask ourselves some serious questions.
Photo: Nástio Mosquito, 3 Continents (Video still), 2010, Duration video: 07:45 min., © Nástio Mosquito, Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA)
Info: Curator: Nav Haq, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), Leuvenstraat 32, Antwerp, Belgium, Duration: 11/10/2024-26/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.muhka.be/
