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 room, titled Around the Fountain, three artists use the space of the public restroom to reimagine it as a site of desire, surveillance, and transgression. There, the photographic series On Porcelain by Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Rojas enters into dialogue with iconic works such as Fountain (1917) by Marcel Duchamp, whose provocative reinterpretation of the urinal as art opened a major rupture in the history of modern art, and The Bell by Wolfgang Tillmans, a color photograph of an open urinal highlighting the shine of stainless steel and a design that encourages subtle contact between men.

ON PORCELAIN

The On Porcelain series (1979) by Miguel Ángel Rojas marks a crucial moment in the history of contemporary Colombian 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, captured surreptitiously through a circular peephole. This visual device not only reinforces the notion of a furtive gaze but also turns the viewer into an active participant, implicated in the dynamics of desire and observation. By recording this type of interaction in a public space, Rojas destabilizes traditional notions of privacy, visibility, and censorship.

In a deeply conservative Colombia during the 1970s, this work was a radical gesture. Rojas was one of the first artists to openly treat the male body as an object of desire, bringing to light queer realities that remained hidden from the dominant cultural discourse. On Porcelain is not only an intimate record but also a political and personal statement. Initially exhibited as tiny dots that forced the viewer to lean in for a closer look, these images eventually became documents of memory, later recontextualized by the artist into larger, serial formats.

The cinemas where Rojas took these images—the Faenza, Mogador, and Imperio—were decaying spaces, reflections of a marginal urban environment. With only the light of the screen as his source, the artist captured not just the act itself, but the ambiguous atmosphere between anonymity and exposure. This blend of eroticism and symbolic violence, present in the action films being screened, foreshadowed key themes in Rojas’s later work: armed conflict, drug trafficking, and social exclusion in Colombia.

TRAJECTORY

Throughout his career, Rojas has intertwined the personal and the political, exploring identity, memory, and the power structures that shape life in Latin America. His work has evolved to include reflections on indigenous heritage, illegal economies, capital flows, and tensions between the Global North and South. With a practice that transcends genres and formats, Miguel Ángel Rojas has become a central figure in global art, and On Porcelain remains one of his most emblematic works for its ability to unsettle, provoke, and resist oblivion.

Recognized for his exploration of themes such as the body, marginality, sexuality, and structural violence, Rojas is featured in the exhibition with his photographic series On Porcelain (1979), taken through the keyholes of the bathroom doors at the Faenza Theater. In these black-and-white images, the artist documents a sexual encounter between two men, highlighting the tension between the apparent neutrality of public space and its use as a refuge for the intimate and the forbidden. The backgrounds are defined by the characteristic white porcelain that gives the series its name. Around the keyhole, dark borders create a kind of visual vignette, alluding to the fragile line between the intimate and the public.

The artist’s intent is to present each image as a kind of peephole into a private encounter within a shared space, challenging any singular reading and generating images charged with a duality of fascination and unease. The work questions the boundaries of legality, visibility, and representation. The choice of the public bathroom as a setting is no coincidence: these spaces, designed for private bodily functions, have historically served as meeting points for homosexual relationships, particularly in contexts where the law criminalized such practices.

THE QUEER AND THE POLITICAL

In the 1970s, Miguel Ángel Rojas began one of the most defining periods of his artistic career, marked by a sharp exploration of desire, marginality, and surveillance. His work from this time was characterized by the use of photography as a critical tool, documenting clandestine spaces. Through precise framing and strategies of indirect observation, Rojas exposed the tensions between private and public in a society that criminalizes sexual dissent. At the same time, he incorporated non-traditional materials and objects that challenged the boundaries of art, positioning himself as a pioneer of conceptual art in Colombia and Latin America. His work from the 1970s is key to understanding how art can become both political testimony and a tool of resistance against normative structures of power and representation.

In recent years, his focus has shifted to questioning failed drug policies and their consequences for rural communities, exposing the exclusion and inequality that affect them.
 

A FINAL INTERPELLATION

The curatorial journey of Materials & Objects closes with a powerful provocation: Which objects, spaces, and bodies are deemed worthy of entering the museum? The inclusion of the On Porcelain series by Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Rojas offers a forceful response from art itself: those who have historically been excluded also shape the memory, aesthetics, and politics of our culture. By documenting intimate encounters between men in public restrooms, Rojas brings visibility to narratives that have long been silenced, positioning desire, dissent, and vulnerability as legitimate axes of museological discourse.

This critical reflection is framed within the Materials & Objects exhibition, a permanent section of Tate Modern in London, part of the museum’s free-access collections. Rojas’s work not only challenges the notion of what is considered art by incorporating the everyday and the illicit, it also expands the boundaries of what is worthy of being observed, preserved, and celebrated in one of the world’s most important contemporary art institutions.