The visual artist, missionary pastor, evangelist singer, writer and composer Ventura Profana participates in the third edition of Pivô Satélite, Pivô’s platform for digital projects. Profana’s work questions the moral hypocrisy and the patriarchal, white, and capitalist logic of churches, especially the neo-Pentecostal ones. The proposal is part of the curatorial project Sex, Lies and Videotape, by Raphael Fonseca.

Watch it here.

Ventura Profana prophesizes the fall of the lord. Her mission is to evangelize, that is, to spread the good news that heralds the end of the colonial state, of male dominance, and of white supremacy. Raised in a traditional Baptist family in the countryside of Bahia, Profana has structured her work based on the concept of “edification,” the spiritual and physical construction of a fortress that welcomes, shelters, and is able to project black transvestite lives, dissident lives, into what she calls an “eternal field. She explains, “My work is to reflect all the time on the evil plan that imprisons us in captivity in a time of death. The way that this captivity has been erected is in the temporal spectrum of eternity when the lord stands as lord of lords. My dispute is for the eternal, assimilating the strategies of the enemy to produce balms that are assertive. It is the restitution of my image as a celestial, divine, superpowered body. I dispute eternity knowing my finitude.”

About the curatorial project

Sex, Lies and Videotape takes its title from Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film of the same name. One of the film’s iconic dialogues reads, “A liar is the second-worst form of a human being.” From this provocation, the narrative revolves around the notion of desire, sex, truth, and virtuality. In the 1980s, access to portable video cameras became popular – as did the notions of surveillance and fiction around our own filmed images.

The four artists gathered in this third episode of Pivô Satellite – Laura Fraiz, Eduardo Montelli, Ventura Profana and New Memeseum – constantly challenge the boundaries between documentation and fiction. Through videos, audios, gifs, and memes, they constantly explore their self-images, making public questions about faith, narcissism, hegemonic narratives, and institutional critique. Beyond the increasingly invisible limits between what could become a “truth” or a “lie” in 2021, there is another essential element that unites them: the ability to seduce the public eye.