Curated by Juan José Santos Mateo, a critic and researcher from Valladolid now based in São Paulo, the exhibition Ora pro nobis is the first institutional show in Spain by Paulo Nazareth.

The Brazilian is one of the most prominent figures on the international art scene today. For the chapel of the Museo Patio Herreriano, he is presenting a new installation centred on Pereskia aculeata, a climbing species of the cactus family common in Minas Gerais, the region where the artist was born. This plant used to grow wild around churches. During sermons delivered in Latin, worshippers would gather and eat its leaves, which were valued for their nutritional qualities. For this reason, it came to be known by two names: “Ora pro nobis”, a reference to the prayer to the Virgin Mary, “Pray for us”, and “poor man’s meat”, reflecting its culinary use. Room 9 presents a selection of works that connect the political with the spiritual. With the artist’s characteristic sense of humour, they pay tribute to the figure of the mother, a unifying theme throughout the exhibition. Included is the photographic series Bocotudos Heritage, in which the artist’s mother, Ana Gonçalves da Silva, poses at the Museum of Man (Musée de l’Homme) in Paris alongside exoticising portraits of members of the Borun Krenak ethnic group, from which she and the artist are both descended, and the Museum of the Mother, MAMA, partly a monument, partly an archive, and partly an invitation to pay collective tribute to all mothers, including those of past visitors, wherever MAMA has travelled, and present visitors, who come to discover one of the most significant artists on the current art scene.

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