"No one bears witness for the witness"

These words, borrowed from the poet Paul Celan, appear at the start of No One (2025), Carlos Moa’s new video and the emotional heart of his exhibition at mor charpentier. What does it mean to bear witness? Can a witness be more than a bystander? Is it enough to record and share what we see? How can we resist in meaningful ways? What if we are among those the government wants to disappear? Who bears witness for the witness?

After Celan’s text fades, the artist appears in a tightly cropped closeup of his head and shoulders, surrounded by darkness. Over the course of forty-five minutes, Moa aempts to look straight ahead at the camera without blinking—an impossible task that turns his eyes bloodshot and watery, and at last brings him to tears. No One is a collaboration with the composer ELO, whose sorrowful soundtrack evokes the thrum of heavy machinery and the drone of an insect swarm or weapons of war, mixed with Moa’s amplified breaths. Slowly, the sound swells into a symphony of melody and noise, before returning to the spareness of a piano and a desolate horn. Fieen minutes into the video, a distorted male voice begins enunciating a series of words—among them, equality, identity, inclusion, justice—which stuer, echo, and fade. These are the words banned from use in the US federal government under Trump.

The second room of the gallery contains recent photography and drawing, dating from 2019 and 2021. With references to the history of poetry and art—Dante’s deviance from the straight path, Goya’s depiction of brutal discipline, Mapplethorpe’s mirror onto pleasure and pain—these works present Moa’s earlier formal and conceptual explorations of self-portraiture and visibility, transgression and punishment, recuperation and resistance. A new sculpture, El Auto de Fe (2025), is positioned in the center of the space. Made from ceramic painted the blackest of blacks, it is another portrayal of No One, burned alive by the Inquisition for “sins of the flesh.” All that remains are charred pieces: feet engulfed in flames that curl like locks of hair; a peaked cap engraved with demons; a rosary with the devil on a burning crucifix; two hands connected by rope, fists raised as if in a final act of defiance.

Tracing a vicious lineage of expulsion and elimination through to today, Moa continually shis from witness to subject and back again. We are all joined in this eternal embrace; sometimes we bear the weight, and sometimes we are borne by others. In truth, there is no third position—except to look away. Here Moa presents us with a moral imperative in the face of cruelty: to endure, to resist, to confront, and, ultimately, to protect one another.