GLASGOW.- Tramway presents the European premier of HEAVEN, a film work by Brazilian artist Luiz Roque from Saturday 2 September.

Luiz Roque’s HEAVEN is about an intense love story surviving under pressure. In the year 2080, a time when the Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis) mutates into a much more aggressive version – connected to immunodeficiency diseases – a complex sociopolitical tangle comes to surface. Not by chance, the narrative takes place a hundred years after the beginning of the 1980, a decade marked by the discovery of AIDS – a process that took over the news and absorbed the global imagination, and was deliberately used to create social stigmas. In the movie, the new potential epidemic is transmitted through saliva, and hitting mainly the transsexual community, that now has to struggle in a resistance against both the deep health problem and the public oppression.

With a cast comprised of transsexual actresses, HEAVEN comments, in a very energetic – and yet delicate – way, the control of the bodies by the state, in a condition where in bureaucratic borders lead to the violent dissociation between biological life and political existence. Attracted by the power of image, and especially by the sensations that it evokes, the artist combines the nature of science fiction — as a device airing a hypothesis — with the resources of cinematographic language to approach the common tensions of everyday life.
(Germano Dushá)

Luiz Roque was born in Cachoeira do Sul, Brazil, 1979. He lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. His most recent solo exhibitions include Mendes Wood DM São Paulo / Bruxelas (2017). Additionally, his work has been included in institutional group exhibitions as Avenida Paulista, MASP, São Paulo (2017); 32 Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2016); A Mão Negativa, EAV Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro (2015); The Violet Crab, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2015); The Brancusi Effect, Kunsthalle, Vienna, (2014); 9 Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2013); Amor e ódio à Lygia Clark, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsow (2013).