Luiz Roque: Paradise

Time: museum hours

Admission: with museum entrance

This exhibition extends beyond the festival dates. It is on view from March 25th – June 15th.

The films of Luiz Roque’s (1979, Cachoeira do Sul, Brazil) are tightly edited cinematic vignettes, distilled to essential images and often hypnotic scores, which explore social, geopolitical, and environmental aspects of contemporary culture. Characterized by open-ended narratives, his films engage with queerness as a space of liminality, offering a strategy for complicating Western modernism and its successors while simultaneously opening channels that link the past, present, and future. This creates a form of abstract storytelling where bodies and cities are often juxtaposed, exploring the artificiality and transformation of these bodies—whether human, animal, or chimera-like—and the interactions between these beings and their environments.  

Paradise explores a feeling of desire and spiritual transcendence in select films, where forms come together–through dancing, holding, gazing, and crashing. Roque’s videos explore the tensions between the natural and the constructed, often blurring the lines between what is visible and what is obscured. In several of the works on view, the moon appears as a guiding light and offers direction amidst the darker sides of paradise. Roque illuminates joy and communion within his work, often casting characters from the LGBTQ+ community in Brazil, such as dancers, drag queens, and other personas. Within the landscape of his imagination, queerness is not just a form of identity but a horizon—a space between times, a cosmic paradise. 

Photo: Luiz Roque, Clube Amarelo, 2024