He’s been hanged, stabbed and cut in galleries – now artist Carlos Martiel is being buried alive

Carlos Martiel says that, growing up in Cuba, art became ‘an escape route, a refuge, a firearm, and a means to express myself freely’. Pictured: Tierra de nadie. Photograph: Eliot Leblanc/Galleria Continua/Carlos Martiel

In 2022 in a Los Angeles gallery, Carlos Martiel placed a noose around his neck and suspended his nude body from a rope tied to the ceiling. The piece was titled Cuerpo, Spanish for “body”, and the photographs and footage alone are shocking, mournful and distressing, as volunteers take turns holding his body aloft to prevent the real risk of asphyxiation.

In conceiving the work, the Cuba-born, New York-based Afro-Latinx artist viewed hundreds of photographs of public lynchings from across the US – a brutal history of normalised extrajudicial violence that has moved artists from Billie Holiday to film-maker Steve McQueen. Those lynchings were also a kind of public performance: of terror, dehumanisation and white supremacy.