Organised by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational (HTRC:T) in partnership with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), this event takes as its starting point Leda Maria Martins’ book Performances of Spiral Time 2025.
The event bring together artists and curators who engage with notions of 'spiral’ time, as theorised by Brazilian scholar Leda Maria Martins. Through presentations by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Nádia Taquary, Julieta Gonzalez, Claire Tancons and Thiago de Paula Souza, it examines how Afro-diasporic cosmologies, traditions and non-linear time inform artistic and curatorial practices.
HTRC:T was founded at Tate Modern in 2019 with the mission to decentre from and revise dominant art histories by highlighting the interconnectedness of artists and ideas, and the ways in which movement, exchange and circulation have shaped artistic practice over the 20th and 21st centuries. MASP is a diverse, inclusive, and plural museum whose mission is to establish, critically and creatively, dialogues between past and present, cultures and territories through the visual arts.
Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in collaboration with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP).
13.00–14.00 I Keynote by Leda Maria Martins
Performances of Spiral Time 2025 emerges from Leda Maria Martins’s reflections and lived experience as a researcher and a member of the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário do Jatobá in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Martins traces the curved movements of memory through concepts including ‘oraliture’, ‘the body-screen' and ‘spiral time’. Challenging the colonial privileging of writing as the primary vehicle of cultural expression, she explores how ancestral and diasporic knowledge is inscribed and transmitted through voice, gesture, movement, song and the body. Performance becomes a portal through which memory exceeds the past, continually reactivated in the present and opening onto the future. In spiral time, ancestral presence unfolds alongside human, vegetal and animal life, bringing past, present and future into a continuous, curved relation.
The keynote will be followed by a conversation with Martins exploring how her concept of spiral time informed the curatorial approach to the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, Choreographies of the Impossible (2023).
14.00–16.00 I Session 1
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nádia Taquary and Daniel Lind-Ramos
This session explores how artistic practices embody memory and sustain ancestral knowledge across time. Drawing on Afro-Cuban and Yoruba spiritual traditions, María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s performances and photographic works weave together ritual, memory and histories of displacement. Nádia Taquary’s sculptures reclaim African material and spiritual knowledge, invoking ancestral cosmologies through bronze, the body and the sacred. Daniel Lind-Ramos’s assemblages, formed from objects gathered from the landscapes and communities of Loíza, Puerto Rico, bring histories of enslavement, resistance and ecological change into the present. Across their practices, materials, rituals and stories become vessels of memory and agency, challenging linear narratives of history and opening up understandings of time as embodied, cyclical and continually renewed through relationships between ancestors, communities and the living world.
15.00–16.00 I In-conversation and audience Q&A
17.30–19.30 I Session 2
Julieta González, Claire Tancons and Thiago de Paula Souza
This session proposes alternative conceptions of curved time in curatorial practice, reflecting on non-linear forms of display and exhibition-making as possible frameworks for future museological thinking. Drawing on Julieta González’s work on Histórias Latino-Americanas at MASP, Claire Tancons’s research into processional performance and Caribbean ritual traditions, and Thiago de Paula Souza’s engagement with poetic forms of connection, heat-limit and transformation, the discussion explores how curatorial approaches can rethink geography, time and history. From the rhythms of processions to the spatial and material gestures of exhibition-making, these practices imagine time as something that unfolds and returns, allowing memory to be continually reactivated in the present.
18.30–19.30 In-conversation and audience Q&A
Participants
Leda Maria Martins
Leda Maria Martins is a Brazilian poet, dramaturg and researcher whose work explores performance, Afro-diasporic cultures, ancestry and memory. A professor and author, she has developed concepts including oraliture, the body-screen and spiral time. Her thinking informed the 35th São Paulo Biennial 2023, and she received the Shell Theatre Award in 2026.
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Daniel Lind-Ramos is an Afro-Puerto Rican artist known for large-scale assemblages made from found and gifted objects, often gathered in Loíza or in the aftermath of hurricanes. Combining everyday materials and natural elements, his work explores Afro-Puerto Rican histories, ancestral memory, ecology, colonialism and the intertwined histories of Black life, land and resistance.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a Cuban artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses photography, painting, sculpture, video, performance and installation. Drawing on her Afro-Cuban, Chinese and Hispanic heritage, she explores migration, displacement, spirituality, family and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. Ritual, memory and ancestral connection are central to her work, exhibited internationally.
Nádia Taquary
Nádia Taquary is a Brazilian artist based in Salvador, Bahia, whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation and video. Her research engages with Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions, with particular attention to the histories of Black women and their protagonism, material culture and ancestry. Drawing on the symbolic languages of adornment and Afro-Brazilian jewellery, her work explores identity, spirituality, memory and knowledge production.
Julieta González
Julieta González is a curator and writer specialising in modern and contemporary art, particularly Latin American practices. She is Adjunct Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at MASP, where she co-curated Histórias Latino-Americanas with Amanda Carneiro, exploring Latin America as a contested idea shaped by overlapping territories, histories and narratives.
Thiago de Paula Souza
Thiago de Paula Souza is a curator and educator based in São Paulo, Brazil. His practice explores transmutation, eroticism, gender nonconformity and intimacy. He co-curated the 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025), the 2024 Panorama da Arte Brasileira at MAM São Paulo, and Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row, London.
Claire Tancons
Claire Tancons is a Guadeloupean curator and art historian whose practice explores public space, carnival, masquerade and processional performance. Founder and director of EXTEMPORA, she has curated international biennials and exhibitions. Her research focuses on the Creole and Maroon Caribbean and Amazonia, diasporic memory, cultural sovereignty and colonial histories.
Convenors
Tobias Ostrander, Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator at Large, Latin America, Tate; Beatriz García-Velasco, Curator, Tate Modern; Amanda Carneiro, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern; Osei Bonsu, Jorge M. Pérez Senior Curator, Africa and Diaspora, Tate Modern; Amelia Francis, Programme Manager, HTRC:T, Tate Modern; Anne Kimunguyi, Exhibitions Assistant, Tate Modern; André Mesquita, Curator Coordinator; MASP; Glaucea Helena de Britto, Assistant Curator, MASP; Bruna Fernanda, Curatorial Assistant, MASP; Daniela Rodrigues, Supervisor of Mediation and Public Programs, MASP.
