Cease and Desist is an exploration of the moral and legal boundaries of art in the public use of private records. Through textile works, video, archival photography, text, and performance, Montserrat Camargo presents an exhibition that plays with the narration of experience in order to question concepts such as truthfulness, responsibility, reliability, and attribution in relation to the creation and reception of artistic discourse.

Rather than providing answers to these questions, the exhibition seeks to involve the audience in a dilemma that implicates the possibilities for the expression and artistic articulation of lived experience. One’s own desires and those of others—oscillating between censorship and curiosity, communication and silence, ethical pleasure and aesthetic pleasure—converge in an artifact whose individual works thus become the traces of this struggle.

Above all, Cease and Desist asserts the necessity for art to have the indispensable space of freedom required even to pose these tensions, which form a fundamental part of artistic practice.