"Thiá Sguoti, in turn, an artist whose obsession lies with the mythical figure of the mermaid, represents in the work Como Invocar uma Deusa a sigil used to invoke deities in certain religious rituals. It is a sculpture cast in iron and gold-leafed, composed of geometric lines, curves, and strokes, representing Vepar, a deity from medieval Western demonology — a being, after all, 'half woman, half monster.'"
Curatorial for the artwork: How To Invoke a Goddess.
— Roger Valença
Curator and Artist
" (...) 'Como Invocar uma Deusa' (How to Invoke a Goddess), part of Thiá Sguoti's Sigils series, features an iron sculpture gilded with gold leaf, representing a symbol historically used to invoke deities in pagan rituals. Found across various pagan religious traditions, sigils are graphic seals associated with spiritual entities. This abstract structure, composed of lines, curves, and geometric forms, depicts Vepar, a figure from medieval Western demonology commonly understood as a mermaid."
Curatorial text for the exhibition: A Noite Não Adormece nos Olhos das Mulheres.
"From the submerged depths of spirituality emerges the figure that, for centuries, was condemned to symbolic exile. Transformed by the Christian imagination into a cursed creature associated with temptation, sin, danger, and the demonization of the feminine, the mermaid saw her ancestral ties to the sacred, protection, and fertility gradually stripped away throughout history. Entitled Sanctuary, Thiá Sguoti’s exhibition proposes an inversion of conventional narratives and a displacement of the liturgical ceremony, restoring to these metamorphic bodies the pulpit of devotion, revelation, and transcendence, and returning them to their original place: the center of the altar.
In Greek mythology, sirens were described as aerial, winged beings—part bird—whose songs conveyed prophetic wisdom. It was during the Middle Ages, under the rise of Christianity, that their wings were removed and they came to be represented with fish tails, linked to the serpent of Eden while simultaneously concealing their reproductive organs. This amorphous ambiguity traverses questions of gender and identity that are central to the artist’s research. In its liminality, however, the mermaid becomes a portal, existing as a threshold between land and water, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, material and spiritual realms. Mirrors, channels, and circles, as seen in works such as Venus, Nucleus, and Through What We See the Beyond?, emerge as magical instruments of passage and power.
Although the mermaid is an archetype that escapes normative categories, she remains a universal and omnipresent deity precisely because she inhabits this in-between space. From medieval carvings found in European Christian churches to divinities worshipped throughout Africa, Asia, and the Americas, these entities are recognized as mediators between worlds. Mami Wata, Iara, Nyai Roro Kidul, and Lí Ban or Muirgen are among her many names, echoed in the titles of the works presented here. In The Sacred and the Profane (1957), historian of religions and mythologist Mircea Eliade argues that before conceiving the Earth itself, one must first understand the religious significance of Waters, for they precede all creation, as described in Genesis: “Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” According to Eliade, waters symbolize the universal sum of all potentialities: they are fons et origo, the primordial source and reservoir of every possibility of existence; they precede all form and sustain all creation.
Derived from the glorified magnitude of the waters, marine spirits likewise belong to this sacred continuum. Of particular importance is the figure of the fish, associated with Baptism, the Eucharist, and the Greek term ichthys, an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” The episcopal mitre itself evokes, in its form, the open mouth of this thalassic creature, while the geometric intersection known as the Vesica Piscis similarly outlines its shape. By venerating and sacralizing these beings, as in works such as Spiritual Bond and Guardian—the latter sanctifying the jawbone of a shark—Thiá Sguoti elevates them to the status of reliquaries.
Conceived as a church, temple, or non-dogmatic mass, the exhibition design presents this mystical cartography through a body of works produced in ceramic, resin, latex, wood, iron, acrylic paint, oyster shell, and organic matter, many of them gilded with gold leaf. Referencing the Byzantine tradition, in which gold symbolized the divine, eternity, and the spiritual realm, the artist symbolically canonizes beings that have historically been relegated to the margins. Sigils, oracles, votive coins, sacred-inspired prints, heads, tails, scales, and ritual assemblages function as beatified artifacts, returning to the depths the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Such is the mystery of faith."
Curatorial text for the exhibition: Santuário.
— Marina Bortoluzzi
Curator and founder of Women on Walls
"As the audience enters the space, they encounter Metamorfose, a large-scale photograph by Thiá Sguoti that cuts across the room like a mystical monolith descending to earth to alter realities and bring back those who were erased. In the image, a natural landscape is intervened upon by the scales of a trans-species from the origin of the world, what the artist calls an artifact of fiction/non-fiction, a fissure opening in the sand of the beach toward a rebirth. In the desire to invoke a reference to lost ancestry through an archaeology of reinvention, the work extends onto the walls that sustain the space; thus, a new scale is seen emerging on the surface located to the left of the photograph. In the fragment of this kind of skin, produced in latex, we observe the presence of a sacred goddess who outmaneuvers the concrete and transforms the nascent world into a transcendental form of existence. It becomes evident that by excavating the structures of a society built upon forged forgetting, and by recreating the artifacts of lost links, the work announces the urgency of a new golden age, one that historically inscribes trans existences into the pantheon of eternity."
Curatorial text for exhibition: Portal.
— Bruno Cordeiro
Curator and Artist
"(...) Thiá Sguoti, in turn, summons mythological beings and chimeras, especially the mermaid, to create metamorphic bodies, portals to ancestral memories and to non-human/divine spiritualities, where imagination is also an act of resistance."
Curatorial text of the exhibition: Corpo Vibrátil.
— Lucas Dilacerda
Curator and Art Critic
"The geometric figure known as the Vesica Piscis is materialized in the amphora, which is being exhibited in an art space for the first time. This central piece, which connects all the others, presents two circles of equal size intersecting one another. It is a powerful symbol, part of the sacred geometry of many ancient civilizations. The Vesica Piscis also recalls Set Theory by indicating the possibility that something may belong simultaneously to two distinct groups. In other words, it creates a shared zone, affirming that something does not need to be either A or B, but can be A and B at the same time. It is a drawing full of implications, one that goes beyond the binarism linguistically expressed by the conjunction or, favoring instead a simultaneity expressed by the conjunction and.
Since when has the binary logic of gender become socially naturalized? Since when has it become the only logic validated by governments, institutions, and by the very writing of History? In this sense, the Vesica Piscis can be understood as a lost link now rediscovered, or perhaps re-presented. Not only because it displays the connection between two circles, the materialization of the very definition of a link, but also because it reconnects us to a past in which categories might have related to one another in different ways. It is a past fabulated by the exhibition, whose concrete existence will never be attested, yet which the objects gathered here nevertheless claim, in their own way, recognition."
Curatorial text of the exhibition: Vesica Piscis: O Elo Perdido.
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— Thais Rivitti
Curator and manager of Ateliê397
"It was through the discovery of herself as a non-binary person that Thiá Sguoti emancipated herself from the paradigms of society. Her research looks at the body and its identities in a playful way, creating fantasies that merge real bodies and imaginary bodies, inviting a form of sensorial knowledge. Her artistic practice emerges from the layers that shape ways of living, behaviors, actions, clothing, and the interrelations between bodies."
Text for Superbacana+
"Drawing from extensive research into the imagery of the mermaid and its representations across different cultures, using both organic materials and resin, Thiá Sguoti addresses questions of gender, sexuality, and myth. The artist delves into this feminine and ambiguous figure, whose representations are found primarily within the popular imagination in dialogue with female sexuality."
Curatorial text for the exhibition: Sustentar o Efêmero.
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— Tania Rivitti
Manager of Ateliê397
"Thiá Sguoti (São Paulo, 1995) is a trans artist with a degree in Visual Arts, and her research revolves around the mythical figure of the mermaid, which has interested her since childhood. Each person is a world, as Clarice Lispector once wrote, and entering Thiá’s world becomes increasingly intriguing and complex through the unfoldings and repetitions of our encounters.
The artist tells me about her research, which goes beyond classical mythologies and the more popular readings that mention mermaids, such as the famous Water and Dreams by Gaston Bachelard. She goes deeper, seeking to distinguish the theories, origins, and cultures connected to this ancestral mythology.
For the artist, it is important to move beyond Renaissance references and the constraints imposed by the Catholic Church on the figure of the mermaid, which came to be represented with its genitals covered. Its tail, which previously divided into two scaly legs, became unified from the waist down to the feet. Thiá Sguoti is interested in a more disruptive narrative on the subject and recalls the work of the surrealist René Magritte, who portrayed the figure of the “reverse fish,” with the head of a fish but with legs and genitals once again exposed. Ultimately, the artist seeks to connect with more progressive understandings of corporeality and its social performances, unraveling and fabulating hypotheses around the mermaid figure—one that has reflected spiritual and social questions of specific periods and that, under the artist’s queer perspective, continues to resonate in the present.
Like a memory game, her studio houses an altar filled with small mermaid statues from different nationalities and religions. One of these sculptures is chosen to occupy the first corner of the exhibition space, the vivarium. White and visually discreet, it almost camouflages itself against the color of the walls. The diversity of religiosities manifests in the works Oṣun and Yemọja, whose titles are written in the Yoruba language. Their metallic colors, like scales, take on gold and silver tones, emulating references to religious entities of African origin, expographically arranged one after the other, like sisters.
In the other corner, on the floor to the right, stands the work Fossilized Study of a Mermaid, which is nothing more than the mold from which the fins originate. These fins are also displayed in Vivarium, giving the space the appearance of a kind of mermaid observatory. Thiá expresses her strong interest in fashion and her skill with the interplay between mold and counter-mold, producing casts of her own body that give rise to striking mermaid tails, as seen in the work Land Without Sea, from the series Farsa-Fantasia, which stands out visually in the exhibition, hanging from the ceiling to the floor.
Her most recent production comes from ceramic work, resulting in the piece Portal, an emblematic installation that incorporates the shape of a vesica—a form based on sacred geometry that symbolizes the intersection of two circles. The work takes on a metallic silver tone and is overlaid by a fish head that seems to pierce the physicality of the wall, literally passing through a portal, almost as if connecting across a temporal arch between past and present."
Curatorial text for the exhibition: Vivarium.
— Núria Vieira
Curator and researcher
"This set of photographs addresses questions of gender and concepts of beauty. In the images, the artist poses as a mermaid, a mythological figure present in numerous legends. She personifies the sea and its dangers, since through her beauty and song she lures sailors, drawing them in only to embrace them and kill them by drowning. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the figure is often alluded to as a “devourer” of men, since, being frigid from the waist down, she would be unable to satisfy her sexual impulses.
The classical sculptural posture of the desired body, whether with a beard, sensual hair, makeup, or a mermaid tail, points to different possibilities of beauty, desire, and pleasure through perspectives that escape stereotypes and propose diversity as something to be experienced."
Text for the artwork: Transitions.
— Oscar D'Ambrosio
Curator and Art Critic
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Thiá Sguoti - CNPJ: 34.057.598/0001-77 © All rights reserved by AUTVIS. 2026
