About this Event
Bembé do Mercado — a public feast that celebrates the abolition of slavery in Brazil by saluting the orixás, the deities of Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion rooted in West and Central African traditions — transforms the city’s most everyday space - the public market - into sacred territory. There, where goods mingle with memory and local history, the African deities arrive and reimagine the architecture of daily life, turning an ordinary gesture into an extraordinary practice and everyday ground into a sacred altar.
Occupying the market with the Bembé thus becomes a radical gesture: an affirmation that the Afro-Brazilian sacred will no longer remain confined backstage. On the contrary, it reinvents itself and manifests in open space, among stalls, people, objects, and celebration, as proposed by the exhibition Bembé: The Feast of the King’s Eyes.
Through the gaze of Roque Boa Morte, an artist born of this land of the Bahian Recôncavo, Brazil, I perceive this manifesto-event as a gesture of living amid the storm, calling on the dead, the ancestors, and the living to resist together in a shared territory. Heritage now takes the form of the market, and every figure portrayed embodies the site of memory that is the Recôncavo. There, every body safeguards what History tried to erase.
Roque looks with his whole body, with a strength that rises from the ground. Since childhood he has walked among the rites and affections of Santo Amaro (Bahia, Brazil), his city, attentive to memories that are not written in words alone. His presence in this work is not that of a visitor or an observer, but of an heir conscious of his own history, who transforms remembrance into language and devotion into curatorial gesture. To see the Bembé through his eyes is to encounter the feast anew from within: with tenderness, rigor, and profound responsibility.
Saluting Exú, the orixá of the crossroads and messenger between worlds, Boa Morte - the eye through which we are able to see the Bembé - refuses colonial obedience and charts his own paths, offering his work as a force of transformation, communication, and balance between this world and the sacred, where the realm of our ancestors dwells.
In this context, this curatorial project proposes seeing ritual as writing, song as testimony, and the body as resistance. And if colonial history produced memories of pain, we continue (re)existing in spite of it. We are the trace left behind by the ships, which the Bembé insists on transforming into life. Through this selection of photographs, the exhibition proposes a deep listening to the meanings of history and of Black resistance, fundamental to the critique of the colonial world and to the emergence of the feast as a tool and device of decoloniality.
In this exhibition we are invited to see and read the Bembé as an archive inscribed on the skin, resisting the storm of racism with the strength of ancestral winds. This exhibition is also an invitation to rethink the role of museums. In welcoming the Bembé, the street opens itself to the sacred, to the body, and to orality as legitimate forms of knowledge. Every element on view here is more than an object: it is a sign of belonging, of struggle, of insurgent memory.
These works do not ask permission to exist within the museum: they compel the museum to remake itself in their presence. Here we claim a curatorial practice committed to listening, to historical reparation, and to recognizing ordinary people as readers and creators of heritage.
May this exhibition-journey be received with respect, openness, and reverence toward the unknown, toward that which does not submit, toward what reveals itself even as it holds onto its own cunning and strategies of war. For those who dreamed of a more just, plural, Black, and LIVING world.
Jamile Borges da Silva, PhD, Anthropologist, Professor, and Provost of the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA)
About the Artist
Roque Boa Morte is a Brazilian visual artist and researcher born in Santo Amaro, in the Recôncavo, Bahia, a region with a strong Afro-Brazilian cultural and religious presence. He lives between Brazil and New York, where he develops projects shaped by memory, decoloniality, and the African diaspora. He holds a master’s degree in Ethnic and African Studies, with a focus on visual anthropology, weaving together photography, performance, and ritual in his work as forms of symbolic, political, and ancestral re-inscription.
His notable series include Bembé do Mercado (2018–2022); Figas, Ancestral Hands (2022–2023); and As if Born Free (2024–2025), exhibited in cultural venues across Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Mozambique, and the United States. His body of work investigates Black and dissident visualities as a field of aesthetic and political inquiry and of the elaboration of memory.
Event venue & nearby stays
The City College of New York, Faculty Dining Room, New York, United States
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