Miguel Ángel Rojas: Presents His Photographic Series On Porcelain

The Tate Modern, one of the world’s leading museums of contemporary art, is currently hosting Material & Objects, an exhibition that spans nine galleries and explores how artists around the globe have redefined and repurposed materials in transformative ways.

In the final gallery, titled Around the Fountain, three artists reimagine the public bathroom as a site of desire, surveillance, and transgression. Among them, Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Rojas presents his photographic series On Porcelain, in dialogue with iconic works such as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)—which famously recast the urinal as art, rupturing the history of modern aesthetics—and Wolfgang Tillmans’ The Bell, a color photograph of an open urinal that highlights the reflective shine of stainless steel and its subtle invitation to male proximity.

PORCELAIN

Miguel Ángel Rojas’ series On Porcelain (1979) marks a pivotal moment in Colombian contemporary art. In these six black-and-white photographs, the artist documents anonymous sexual encounters between men in the bathrooms of the Faenza Theater in Bogotá, secretly captured through a circular peephole. This visual device not only reinforces the idea of the furtive gaze, but also implicates the viewer, who becomes an active participant in the dynamics of desire and observation.

In deeply conservative 1970s Colombia, this work was a radical gesture. Rojas was one of the first artists to openly depict the male body as an object of desire, making visible queer realities long erased from dominant cultural discourse. On Porcelain is both an intimate record and a political statement. Initially exhibited as tiny dots requiring viewers to approach closely, the images have since been re-signified by the artist in larger, serial formats, becoming enduring documents of memory.

The cinemas where Rojas captured these images—Faenza, Mogador, Imperio—were spaces in decline, reflecting the margins of urban life. Lit only by the glow of the screen, Rojas captured not just the act itself but an ambiguous atmosphere of anonymity and exposure. This blend of eroticism and symbolic violence, mirrored in the action films playing at the time, prefigures central themes in Rojas’ later work: armed conflict, narcotrafficking, and social exclusion in Colombia.

ARTISTIC TRAJECTORY

Throughout his career, Rojas has interwoven the personal and the political, exploring identity, memory, and the structures of power that shape life in Latin America. His work has expanded to include reflections on Indigenous history, illegal economies, capital flow, and the tensions between the Global South and the developed world. With a practice that crosses media and genres, Miguel Ángel Rojas has become a key figure in global contemporary art, and On Porcelain remains one of his most emblematic series—for its power to unsettle, provoke, and resist erasure.

Renowned for his exploration of the body, marginality, sexuality, and structural violence, Rojas is featured in Material & Objects with his seminal series On Porcelain (1979), photographed through the locks of restroom doors at the Faenza Theater. In these black-and-white images, he documents an encounter between two men, challenging the supposed neutrality of public space by reframing it as a haven for intimacy and prohibition.

The white porcelain surfaces that give the series its title define the setting, while the darkened edges of the peephole create a visual vignette—underscoring the fragile threshold between private and public. Rojas invites viewers to peer into a private encounter within a shared space, creating images steeped in tension, fascination, and discomfort. His work questions the limits of legality, visibility, and representation.

The choice of a public bathroom is deliberate: these spaces, designed for private bodily functions, have historically served as meeting grounds for homosexual encounters, particularly in societies where such practices were criminalized.

THE QUEER AND THE POLITICAL

With more than fifty years of artistic production, Rojas’ work is marked by its bold engagement with queer identity, politics, and the environment—themes once taboo in the national context. He began with hyperrealist drawing and neo-expressionist painting, but over time adopted diverse media and conceptual strategies, building a critical and coherent body of work.

In the 1970s, Rojas emerged as part of a generation that transformed Colombia’s art scene, alongside artists like Fernando Botero, Alejandro Obregón, Beatriz González, and Luis Caballero. Influenced by international movements such as expressionism, conceptual art, and pop, he incorporated these currents while maintaining a strong local anchor. In the 1980s and ’90s, his focus shifted to Indigenous issues and the armed conflict, reflecting Colombia’s social fractures from a committed artistic stance.

In recent years, his work has examined the failures of drug war policies and their devastating effects on rural communities, exposing the inequalities and exclusions embedded in these systems. Rojas has earned international recognition, with his work featured in major institutions such as the Venice Biennale (2024), and included in prestigious collections worldwide. His practice defies categorization, moving freely between political, conceptual, and queer art, always with the intent to challenge the viewer.

LEGACY AND CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE

Miguel Ángel Rojas has played a critical role in the development of conceptual art in Latin America. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and numerous other international venues. His participation in Material & Objects affirms the ongoing relevance of his inquiries into bodies, norms, and desire.

The exhibition’s closing section delivers a powerful provocation: Which objects, spaces, and bodies are deemed worthy of entering the museum?
 Rojas responds by centering those historically excluded.

Material & Objects is part of Tate Modern’s permanent collection and is free to the public in London.