Complete Breech (2025)
by Nando Messias
Commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery as part of London Open Live
Nando Messias was born arse-first—in an entry into the world known medically as a complete breech. Taking its title from this non-normative birth, Complete Breech poetically stages the admission and orientation of trans and excluded bodies in a rejecting world. It foregrounds the immediacy and beauty of the unwelcome, the unacceptable, the unviable. Corporeal existence itself, after all, can now constitute a categorical breach of contract, as a techno-oligarchy rolls out an update to the terms and conditions of civic life.
Messias, a Brazilian-born local artist, moves nimbly between the demands of live art, performance, fashion and academia. Their trans-disciplinary practice is as ethical as it is playful. Their body of work is known as distinctive, unique and extraordinary in its radical beauty, glamour, awe and ferocity—all illuminated by a gentle shaft of humour.
In Complete Breech Messias stages a unique physical presence through sculptural acrobatics and a choreography of myth making, trans rights and bodily autonomy. The work weaves together the ancestral rhythms and imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian sacred rites as well as the mock births of London’s eighteenth-century molly-house subculture. The body here is poised on a gallery pedestal as monument of transition, honesty and precarity. It is deconstructed and flayed, stripped of power or signification, in an exquisite critique of rights, identity and historicity.
by Nando Messias
Commissioned by the Whitechapel Gallery as part of London Open Live
Nando Messias was born arse-first—in an entry into the world known medically as a complete breech. Taking its title from this non-normative birth, Complete Breech poetically stages the admission and orientation of trans and excluded bodies in a rejecting world. It foregrounds the immediacy and beauty of the unwelcome, the unacceptable, the unviable. Corporeal existence itself, after all, can now constitute a categorical breach of contract, as a techno-oligarchy rolls out an update to the terms and conditions of civic life.
Messias, a Brazilian-born local artist, moves nimbly between the demands of live art, performance, fashion and academia. Their trans-disciplinary practice is as ethical as it is playful. Their body of work is known as distinctive, unique and extraordinary in its radical beauty, glamour, awe and ferocity—all illuminated by a gentle shaft of humour.
In Complete Breech Messias stages a unique physical presence through sculptural acrobatics and a choreography of myth making, trans rights and bodily autonomy. The work weaves together the ancestral rhythms and imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian sacred rites as well as the mock births of London’s eighteenth-century molly-house subculture. The body here is poised on a gallery pedestal as monument of transition, honesty and precarity. It is deconstructed and flayed, stripped of power or signification, in an exquisite critique of rights, identity and historicity.
WATCH TRAILER HERE.