Artists’ laboratory given over to developing transdisciplinary projects that has developed alternative pedagogy workshops and creation labs dedicated to body-arts and somatic experimentation. Its work has exhibited in Mexico, Spain and the United States. Standout shows include Seis motivos, at the Galerie Nordenhake, and I See You, presented at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art. It released the music album Cancionero de la sexual disidencia tapatía on internet transmission platforms in collaboration with ROSAS and producer Ferdinando Capacete. The laboratory has additionally participated in DespertaLab, a Barcelona-Mexico exchange and did an artist-in-residence stint at Nau Ivanow and a season at Sala Atrium. Arrogante Albino exists thanks to exchange and various local artists’ willingness to participate; it has organized events, built bridges, put on concerts, recorded musical albums and staged encounters in spaces dedicated to the visual and performing arts.

Fuera de campo, 2024
Video installation, endurance art
In memory of Alan Olivares (†)
Direction: Arrogante Albino
Performers: Cravioto, Nayely Espinosa, Jorge Flores “Templa”, Leslie Huichapa, Amiyatzín Murrieta, Danna Sánchez, and Paula Reyes-Pérez
Actors in the video: Jesús Estrada Escobedo, Emiliano González, Héctor Jiménez Castillo, Natalia Martínez Mejía, Ilián A. Mejía Amezcua, Alejandro Mendicuti, Darío Millán Mejía, Alan Olivares (†), Ruth Ramos, Elizabeth Tapia, and Carolina Vázquez-Chau

Fuera de campo takes its name from a term in the audiovisual arts (“offscreen”) that describes what’s happening beyond a shot’s framing. Live performances will interact with this video installation at different times during the Biennial. This project began with a laboratory exercise for Art Department students and graduates at the University of Guanajuato. The goal was to explore the role of fiction in narratives during the editing phase and how video and text can be used as truth-producing technologies and mechanisms for self-narrative. The result of the laboratory exercise is a film fragmented onto three screens and expanded into space through texts, props, elements that comprise a set, and the actions of bodies that complete or direct the meaning of a scene. The work generates new relationships and interpretations of the images through the use of juxtaposition. The installation is a pastiche: a collage of the participants’ words, images, stories, and references—a character comprised of fragments. The film is, in actuality, many films that accumulate and morph over time.

Poet and a draftswoman who studied graphic design at the Universidad d Guanajuato. She also holds an MFA in sociocultural studies from El Colegio de la Frontera/Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. She has published thirteen poetry compilations, most recently Los pájaros y su representación gráfica en la obra científica del doctor Alfredo Dugès (Colección Autores de Guanajuato, Editorial la Rana, 2023), Cólera morbus (Editorial Rana, 2019), Ojo avizor (recuento) (Universidad de Guanajuato, 2019), Newspaper Birds of March 2011 (Editorial Cinosargo, 2019), among others. Caballero Prado’s work has been anthologized in poetry compilations and magazines both in and out of Mexico. The XV Muestra de Artistas Guanajuatenses, from 2024; a Rosebud Books poetry reading in Helsinki, in 2024; the Los Límites del Lenguaje Festival in Moscow, 2012; and the LATINALE Festival de Poesía Latinoamericana, in Berlin, 2006 and 2007 figure among her most notable literary exhibitions and presentations. She is currently putting together an interdisciplinary project, Mil pájaros mil. Tesis autodoctoral, wherein music, graphics and literature jointly reside. She has been a Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte en México member since 2021. 

Artist who explores traditional and avant-garde graphics’ possibilities as well as language and poetry. Transformation is a constant in her work, like a changing, vulnerable existence irremediably linked to time. It moves her to go after documenting what lives, events and affects that come from identity, memory, the intimate and women’s bodies. Guerrero graduated from the Universidad de Guanajuato with a visual arts BFA. Standout solo shows include 2023’s El drama de lo sucedido en León, in Guanajuato; Entropía at the Museo Inconográfico del Quijote, from 2022. She received a Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico grant, in 2023 and 2024, as well as a Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes “Jóvenes Creadores” grant from 2017 and 2018. She was an instructor at the Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramírez el Nigromante engraving workshop in San Miguel de Allende and is now teaching engraving at the Centro de las Artes de Guanajuato. She put down roots and does her work in San Miguel de Allende, where she oversees the La Mar Gráfica independent workshop.  

His Artistic research centers on tensions between document and fiction, family archives and national stories, body presentation and public life. He trained at the Centro de la Imagen’s photographic production seminar as well as at the photo-essay program at Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Fototecas. He is a permanent collaborator at Visual AIDS NY and a founding member of CEPA, a support and artistic expression network for people living with HIV in Tlaxcala. He has exhibited at the Musei d’Arte Contemporani de Barcelona; the Museo de Arte Moderno in Cuenca, Spain; the Museo de la Ciudad de México; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and New York’s New Museum. He received the jury prize at the Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de la Ciudad de México as well as the Premio Estatal de Artes Visuales de Tlaxcala prize. Bordello also garnered a “Jóvenes Creadores” grant from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) in 2016; a 2015 support from the Apoyo a las Culturas Municipales y Comunitarias program as well as from the Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico, in 2013; plus a 2011 scholarship from FONCA’s Programa de Fomento y Coinversiones Culturales. 

Amiqui / Sequía, 2022
15 min.

Similar to how the past gets projected onto the future, this piece offers a dual projection: succession and simultaneity—the fusion of an image with those after and next to it, a link between the previous and the following. One part of the piece, Amiqui (which in the Nahuatl language means “to be thirsty”) focuses on the desire to control water in the Preclassic period when the city of Xochitecatl–Cacaxtla was created at the center of the lagoons and rivers that afforded its cultural proliferation. The other part of the piece, Drought, looks at contemporary times. We cannot change the legacy of landscape erosion: lost bodies like the Zahuapan River, which still traverses the city; the Atlihuetzia waterfall, which is now a drain; and the Acuitlapilco lagoon, a stop-off for pelicans that is now drying up. Now, that legacy has a new chapter: a drought caused soft-drink companies and factories.

Filmmaker and political scientist whose work uses everyday devices, archives and media archaeology to link intimate and social memory at the same time she explores different narrative formats. She holds a degree from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and her multifaceted career arc combines cinema, writing and teaching. For more than fifteen years—and in parallel with her arts trajectory—she has been a docent and collaborator at many Mexico and Latin America AV training spaces, with a focus on gender, community-based issues and experimental pedagogies. Burkhard has received a number of recognitions, notably her Gucci scholarship and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts fellowship. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de México who lives and works in Mexico City. 

h’iketeia, 2024
Christiane Burkhard
71 min.

Tempelhof in Berlin, Elliniko in Athens, and exNAICM in Texcoco are airports in the process of undoing, abandonment, or recovery–-suspended in time by financial speculation, the relocation of refugees, or the creation of human and environmental “sanctuaries.” Remnants, vestiges, and voices remain in all three of these spaces. h’ ι κ ε T ε i α is a lyric essay on the symbolic and material layers of these three geographies—all with a link to the director’s personal story. The dance of a mythological Ariadne punctuates warped audiovisuals, and the film puts human endeavors and geology in perspective while considering ways of inhabiting contemporary ruins to restore land ties and promote the right to shelter.

Self-taught filmmaker who trained in workshops at the New York Film Academy as well as at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión; he started his career in music-video production. He completed his first film in 2006 as its co-director, scriptwriter, photographer, producer and editor; from time to time he worked on projects as a camera assistant or a second-unit cinematographer. Beside his work as a director, Cárdenas has collaborated on numerous feature films as co-scriptwriter, director of photography and producer, in tandem with his wife Laura Amelia Guzmán with whom he directs the film production company Aurora Dominicana.

Cochochi, 2007
Israel Cárdenas & Laura Amelia Guzmán
87 min.

Evaristo and Luis Antonio, two children from the Rarámuri community in the Sierra Tarahumara, embark on a journey through the mountains to the other side of a valley in search of medicine for a family member. The route–remote and rugged as the mountain itself–becomes a rite of passage for the children.

Freak obsessed with terror narratives’ paradoxical beauty. After a long history of entrapment in different film-industry and university teaching tentacles, the artist his given his life over to studying, promoting and exhibiting fantasy and horror movies. He holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. From 2010 to 2021 Castillo Flores served as the Mórbido Fest’s programming director. His curation México Maleficarum: Resurrecting 20th-Century Mexican Horror Cinema played in 2023 at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and in 2022 at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.

El testamento de la Momia Mexicana, 2024
90 min.

This performative conference excavates Mexican horror cinema. It guides us through the audiovisual folklore of a genre in which mythology, legend, imagination, history, the unusual, and, of course, sad and absurd realities all coexist. Castillo Flores’ discourse intertwines the two primary threads of Mexico’s cinematographic mummies: indigenous ones suffering from a terrible curse of (lack of)love and those from the Saint Paula Cemetery in Guanajuato that cry for revenge. By revealing and exploring these stories, the film honors the artists, important figures, and events behind the myths that bring Mexican cinema’s mummies to life. 

He studied art and science history at Stanford, where he was a member of the Greco-Roman wrestling team. He holds an MFA in art and design from the University of Michigan, where he also studied anthropology and history. His short films—including two on Mexico’s lucha libre—have been screened at Images, POV, CPH:DOX, Slamdance, Visions du Réel and more than one hundred festivals worldwide. Fairbanks worked as a programmer and translator in Belgium and has taught videoart and videography in Mexico. He is the founding professor of the media arts department at Antioch College in Ohio. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony and the Wexner Art Center’s cinema and video program.

(((((/*\))))) Ecos del volcán, 2019
Charles Fairbanks y Saúl Kak
18 min.

The eruption of the Chichonal volcano in 1982 caused the Zoque community, which had lived on the volcano’s slopes until then, to migrate. Filmed over six years, (((((/*\))))) Echoes of the Volcano studies the ambiance of the town in Chiapas where the Zoque community currently lives. The film is an observational tour and a delight for the eyes and ears. It takes us on a sound journey through musical rhythms and unique announcements played on speakers from the stores and vans of the many traveling vendors that swarm the town. Bit by bit, political discourses emerge. In this express exploration, Charles Fairbanks and Saúl Kak address the community’s cultural depth and the neoliberal pressures on indigenous peoples and their lands.

Multidisciplinary artist whose cinematographic work focuses on themes that reflect on life and death as well as the relation between nature and humankind. Her style is a trip between colors, textures and a combination of visual techniques that challenge narrative convention as a means of eliciting deep and unknown sensations in audiences. As part of her training, she specialized in still and moving photography at the Centro de Periodismo José Martí in Havana. Fernández Alcaide’s work has been presented at festivals such as Animasivo, Kannibal Film Festival, the San Diego Underground Film Festival and ULTRAcinema, and has also been broadcasted on distribution platforms, notably Filmin Latino. She received a “Jóvenes Creadores” grant from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in 2020 and 2021; enjoyed support from the Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico, in 2019 and 2016; and from the Programa de Apoyos a las Culturas Municipales y Comunitarias in 2014.

Ensayo del futuro, 2020
10 min.

In the future, humanity no longer exists. This science fiction piece is created from the record of a species that has become extinct and left behind a story in three parts: past, present, and future.

Interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses  drawing, painting, video, sculpture and installation. Frey has recently incorporated the use of visual filters commonly found in smartphone apps as well as AI image generators as tools into her creative process. The images evoke an uncanny aqueous sensibility that fringes between the absurd and the grotesque, questioning the representation of gender, the body, and the beyond human, while simultaneously establishing a dialogue between new tools of visual production and the legacy of art history. Frey holds a Master’s degree in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria. She lives between Montreal and Mexico City.

Phthethisms 1, 2, 3, 2021. Floobite, 2022. Gratuitous Orange, 2022. The Shadow Is Over My Is My Friend, 2024.

4 min. 30 sec. 1 min. 3 min.

In this series of short videos, the artist turns the image of the body into a chimerical landscape by fusing the pictorial tradition of watercolor with visual effects typical of social networks. The “video-watercolors” compose a world of pantomime-–a canvas inhabited by surrealist diversions that disrupt the logic of the “selfie,” which subverts form expectations through a subtle rebellion against the norms that seek to govern the social perception of bodies, self-image, and beauty standards. This series from Frey’s prolific work features three videos from Phthethisms, produced in 2021 in collaboration with Andrea Young, Sarah Albu, and Elizabeth Lima from the Quebec vocal collective Phth; two pieces from 2022; and Frey’s most recent production in collaboration with musician Luke Nickel.

Actor, director and poet whose work explores fiction through theatre, texts, films and radio productions. He holds an MFA in theatre from Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. In 2003 and in partnership with Luisa Prado, he founded the Lagartijas tiradas al sol collective, from which he has developed stage, publishing and pedagogic processes projects. Gabino Rodríguez has participated in more than thirty feature films, has received numerous prizes and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Festival de Cine de Cali, the Geneva International Film Festival, Cinema Paris and Tolousse. 

Durango, 2023
9 min.

This short film considers the creation of a Durango state hero as a way of exploring identity construction. We know that natural wonders are of little substance without a story and that places need to be associated with a myth or hero that provides meaning and identity—a tale that is easy to pass along. As we say, things must “sell,” and stories sell. And as we know, stories do not have to be true, but good.

Visual artist who uses drawing, photography and writing to produce animated films and interactive installations. He holds an applied arts MFA degree from the Sorbonne and another MFA in animated cinema from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. His work has been shown at animation and videoart exhibitions and festivals in China, France, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States, among other countries. Since 2018 Gerbaud has been the cinematographic animation BFA academic director at Mexico City’s Escuela Superior de Cine. He is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte and since 2005 has lived and worked in Mexico.

Amatlán, 2010
4 min.

Small, simple shapes on a coppery horizon; the dance of water on stones heated by the sun. One spectacle spurs another: the illusion of movement recalls the journey of evolution. This animation was made in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl (Morelos, Mexico), the production center for amate paper in prehispanic times.

Clinamen, 2021
7 min.

El término clinamen es un antiguo concepto en latín que intentaba dar cuenta de los impredecibles giros, sin razón de ser, en el ordenamiento de los átomos. Aquí, a través del meticuloso ensamblaje que propone Gerbaud, los espasmos fortuitos, serpenteos y movimientos bruscos de la figura humana, dan cuenta de un sentido peculiar entre contorno y entorno. La animación hace énfasis en lo mucho que el paisaje da forma a lo humano: seguimos la trayectoria de una figura casi espectral, un espejismo que recorre el mundo en constante contacto con todo lo que le rodea. Los trazos que va delineando constituyen un mapa de interacciones, a veces jocosas; otras tantas, surrealistas. La silueta del cuerpo humano —la cadencia de sus movimientos, su volumen y peso— cobra sentido a partir de las formas, texturas y colores que componen el mundo a su alrededor. ¿Cuál es en realidad el límite entre el cuerpo y su exterior?

Her work is involved in literary and AV essayistic research characterized by play with speculative fiction, mock documentaries and free experimentation in AV media from a narrative space that allows for both inquisitive reflection as well as humor and the absurd. Guizar studied modern Italian literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and has an MFA in animation and special effects from the Szkola Filmova w Lodzi in Lodz, Poland. Guizar was part of the SOMA education program from 2020 to 2022. Her animations have been screened and recognized by film festivals in Mexico and around the world, such as Annecy; the Festival de Cine de Morelia; and at short-film festivals in Tampere, Finland and Uppsala, Sweden.

Toothless, 2021
12 min.

This film essay comprises drawings from old anatomy books, images from esoteric magazines, and soundtracks from public-domain internet videos. The film tells the story of an existential journey—that of a toothless heroine in pajamas who is dragged from the individual unconscious into the collective.

Graduate of Chavón. Escuela de Diseño, where she studied fine arts and photography, as well as the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión, where she majored in cinematography. She has worked on numerous feature films and has taken part in photo exhibitions. Guzmán shares feature film script, production and direction credits alongside her husband Israel Cárdenas, with whom she directs the Aurora Dominicana production company. Since 2004 she has divided her time between México and the Dominican Republic.

Cochochi, 2007
Israel Cárdenas y Laura Amelia Guzmán
87 min.

Evaristo and Luis Antonio, two children from the Rarámuri community in the Sierra Tarahumara, embark on a journey through the mountains to the other side of a valley in search of medicine for a family member. The route–remote and rugged as the mountain itself–becomes a rite of passage for the children.

Artist and activist, a Zoque-language speaker and a member of its age-old culture. He writes poetry in Zoque and in recent years has produced performances, videos and documentaries focused on the community’s difficult situation as well as its residents’ rights and struggles. The artist—the first person in his family to attend a university—graduated from the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas. He is a member of the EDELO artistic collective and a frequent collaborator at Galería MUY, a contemporary art center for Indigenous art and artists throughout Chiapas. His paintings have shown in every corner of the Americas, from Brazil to Canada, and he has been commissioned to paint murals in art and culture centers as well as immigration support organizations in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Tabasco. Kak divides his time between San Cristóbal de las Casas and his birthplace in the Zoque territory in northwest Chiapas.  

(((((/*\))))) Ecos del volcán, 2019
Charles Fairbanks y Saúl Kak
18 min.

The eruption of the Chichonal volcano in 1982 caused the Zoque community, which had lived on the volcano’s slopes until then, to migrate. Filmed over six years, (((((/*\))))) Echoes of the Volcano studies the ambiance of the town in Chiapas where the Zoque community currently lives. The film is an observational tour and a delight for the eyes and ears. It takes us on a sound journey through musical rhythms and unique announcements played on speakers from the stores and vans of the many traveling vendors that swarm the town. Bit by bit, political discourses emerge. In this express exploration, Charles Fairbanks and Saúl Kak address the community’s cultural depth and the neoliberal pressures on indigenous peoples and their lands.

The goal at the Proyecto Kazá collective—kazá means “memory” in the Uza language, also known as Chichimeca Jonaz—is researching, recuperating and spreading regional knowledge for incorporation into children’s education by means of workshops and artistic strategies. At center lies promoting affective care of the environment by using feelings and imagination. The collective collaborates with public elementary schools and invites regional figures to share knowledge that community teachers have in terms of issues like ecology, territory, memory and linguistic diversity. Since 2015, Proyecto Kazá has worked in different locations in Guanajuato’s Sierra Gorda mountains and at the beginning of 2019 it set up its headquarters at the Escuela Primaria Miguel Hidalgo in the town Misión de Arnedo in the Victoria municipal jurisdiction. Amauta García and Daniel Godínez-Nivón are charged with the project’s general coordination.

Kazá memoria de agua, 2021
9 min.

This film documents water stories from the Sierra Gorda region of Guanajuato and a performance people carry out to try to get this liquid to return and seep back into Misión de Arnedo’s land and language.

Kazá memoria de cerro, 2021
11 min.

This film highlights the Ezar people’s close relationship with the land they inhabit: a relationship reflected in the language and made evident by the importance of language as the primary means of perceiving and naming the world. 

Her work includes experimental filmmaking, installation and video. She studied multimedia arts at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes, in Argentina, and holds a diploma in AV preservation and restoration from the Cinemateca y Archivo de la Imagen Nacional de Argentina in conjunction with the Universidad de Buenos Aires, as well as a stint at Abigail Child’s Found Footage workshop and Claudio Caldini’s experimental film workshop. Losana was part of the Trinchera Ensamble and LEC collectives in Mexico as well as Circuito Cin!CO and DNI in Argentina. Her work has been screened at the Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente; the Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata; Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen, Germany; the (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico in La Coruña; Zurich’s VIDEOEX and others. She divides her time between Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

Nanacatepec, 2024
Azucena Losana y Elena Pardo
45 min.

This cinematographic performance combines analog materials in 8 and 16 mm and pre-cinema images with a soundtrack of electroacoustic music. It is inspired by Nanacatepec, a rock traversed by a mycelium network without a defined shape. Its fruits (mushrooms) act as creators and transformers of everything in the world.

Creator, explorer and defender of the moving image. Her film work includes documentaries, animation, installation and live performance. She recently completed Pulsos Subterráneos, an expanded cinema and web documentary project financed with support from the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In 2013, she co-founded the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, a space artists operate to create a community of filmmakers and audiences interested in experimental cinema by including them in film production, training and screenings. Pardo collaborates with training programs at the Campamento Audiovisual Itinerante and the women’s film school JEQO, where she shares knowledge and tools related to AV creation with young people and different communities throughout Mexico. 

Nanacatepec, 2024
Azucena Losana y Elena Pardo
45 min.

This cinematographic performance combines analog materials in 8 and 16 mm and pre-cinema images with a soundtrack of electroacoustic music. It is inspired by Nanacatepec, a rock traversed by a mycelium network without a defined shape. Its fruits (mushrooms) act as creators and transformers of everything in the world.

His work explores the quotidian using fractured, elliptical narratives and by leveraging fiction and documentary tools. He often collaborates with the Lagartijas tiradas al sol theatre collective as well as with actress Teresita Sánchez. His work has been the subject of more than thirty international retrospectives in venues like the Anthology Film Archive, the Jeonju International Film Festival, the Pacific Film Archive and TIFF Cinematheque. Pereda has screened his films at some of the most important international festivals including Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Toronto and Venice, as well as in galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, both in New York; the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris and Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The artist won the Orizzonti prize at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.

Flora, 2020
11 min.

This brief film essay compiles material not used in Pereda’s 2020 feature Fauna. The material reflects on the role of representation in relation to opaque power networks and their direct link to the exploitation of natural assets.

Trilogía de la propiedad privada, 2019-24
55 min.

This cinematographic performance examines the life and work of C.B., a multifaceted artist, political activist, amateur archaeologist, self-proclaimed anarchist, and creator of a small museum dedicated to the history of mining in the Sierra de Catorce desert. Combining live performance, projected audiovisual material, and documentary and fiction film techniques, the piece tells a fascinating story that points to the many ways territories can be inhabited. For Nicolás Pereda, cinema provides the opportunity to intervene in and radically modify reality, and this piece is proof of that.

AV artist who since 1992 has given over all his time to cinema and video research. His creative process has essentially developed in the global South, both geographically and conceptually, particularly in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán, Guerrero, Bolivia and Ecuador. He studied social communication at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Xochimilco but is self-taught when it comes to AV mysteries. Varela’s work has been shown and recognized in numerous forums, exhibitions and film festivals, in and out of Mexico, such as the X Bienal de La Habana; the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; TIFF Cinematheque in Ontario; the Festival Internacional de Cine in Morelia; the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen; Frieze Projects/Lux in London; the Getty Research Institute and the Guggenheim Museum, among others. In 2019, he became a Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte en México member and was named the Rockefeller Foundation’s media artist in 2006. His latest feature film, 2022’s El Prototipo, won a Puma de Plata award for best Mexican film at the 2023 Festival Internacional de Cine UNAM.    

Trans apariencia estéreo voodoo, 2024
7 min.

At what point did everything become a camera, screen, microphone, resonator, or amplifier? Where do the devices for capturing the world end and other instruments of perception begin? This choral story comprises files from a non-human dream of medial action and audiovisual recording tools randomly modified with beaks, claws, tentacles, pincers, and maws. These furtive explorations, recovered from other tangible worlds, invite us to imagine, from a visual perspective, a place that escapes the pretension of control and domination.

Anti-capitalist entrepreneur and draftsman who completed his training at the SOMA educational project. He was artist-in-residence at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten as well as at the interdisciplinary program Pressing Matter, both in Amsterdam. He has exhibited in Mexico and other countries and is a current member of the Tropical Tap Water cooperative. 

Echevefest, 2024
Wall drawing, illustration, Styrofoam logo restored using foam, clock with yarn logo, publication, and archival material from the Echeveste Market
The Echevefest team: Melissa Esquivias (research and workshop leader), Carmen Aguilar Ruvalcaba (production and workshop leader), Gustavo Cruz (research and workshop leader), Magdalena Aguilar Ruvalcaba (production), Paulina Aguilar Ruvalcaba (production), Juan Rico (production), Echeveste Market Committee (management and production), Chantal Rodríguez Reyes (management), Grecia Paola Aguilar Ortega (management and production), and Magdalena Ruvalcaba (production)

Echevefest will be a party with the Echeveste Market community from Northern ​​León, where the artist’s family works. Unlike most markets in the country, which are run by public and municipal administrations, this space emerged as a private project. The market is currently facing economic issues, and a section has been closed. The project aims to reactivate the space, as well as forge connections within the community by organizing a party that celebrates people and stories important to the space. A publication and a video about the process will also be created. Leading up to and during the Biennial, the community has held journalism, archival research, and creative writing workshops—and planned the celebration.

Objects related to the market and the work carried out there are on display in the exhibition room, alongside a timeline that includes drawings and collected and organized data.

Plastic artist who earned a plastic-arts MFA at Yale, as well as a BA at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In addition to solo shows at spaces such as Public Art Fund in New York, from 2023; and that city’s Fortnight Institute, in 2019 and 2022; The Mistake Room in Los Angeles in 2020 and at London’s Maureen Paley in both 2018 and 2021, his work has exhibited at the 2022 59th Venice Biennial, Milk of Dreams; as well as at Prospect. 5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, in New Orleans in 2021;    

Desert X, from the same year, in Palm Springs; among other collective exhibitions. Baeza has received recognitions such as the 2023 Latinx Artist Fellowship from Art Forum magazine; a Getty Research Institute Fellowship from 2022; 2019’s NXTHVN Studio Fellowship; a 2018 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant, among several others. His work has been integrated into collections at the Columbus Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the San José Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Athenium Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Adiós a Calibán, 2017-22
Series of 17 collages on paper
1. Chaac Figure from Mayapan, 2022
2. Xochipilli, 2022
3. Acrobat from Tlatilco, Mexico, 2022
4. Young Girl from Veracruz, 2021
5. Mictlantecuhtli, 2020
6. Chacmool, 2017
7. Hunchback Aztec, 2017
8. Old Man Aztec, 2017
9. Huastec Adolescent from Jalpan, 2022
10. Untitled, 2017
11. Anthropomorphic Female Figure, 2022
12. Teotihuacan Reclining Figure, 2017
13. Macehual, 2020
14. Figure from Toluca, 2021
15. Hunchback Figure from Jalisco, 2022
16. Xipe Totec from Xalapán, 2022
17. God of Fire, 2021

The Pounding of Steel Chopping Away at Your Flesh, 2022
Ink, acrylic, varnish, watercolor, and cut paper on panel

Unruly Forms II, 2023
Ink, acrylic, graphite, varnish and cut paper on panel

Our Shadows Merging, 2023
Ink, acrylic, graphite, varnish and cut paper on panel
Lance Renner Collection

Beyond the Vessel, 2024
Monoprint in watercolor, photolithography, silkscreen, stencil, and collage

Acoge al fantasma, 2024
Photogravure and hardpaste etching with chine collé and collage

Desviación, 2023
Screen printing in 6 colors and collage on Coventry Rag paper

Sentir un entonces y un allí, 2024
Ink, acrylic, cut paper, glitter, and fibers on paper

Baeza’s practice centers on the notion of fugitive bodies in constant evolution, from a queer perspective and one that challenges the fixed notion of identity terms. The artist also explores the liminality and sense of uprooting that migrants experience. Baeza’s images depict hybrid bodies that inhabit landscapes and merge with undefined spaces. This set of works combines various graphic, pictorial, and collage techniques, whose intersections inscribe the artist’s ideas about never-fixed identities in materials. Baeza views working with materials as a form of emancipation. 

His work takes inspiration from science fiction, illustration and natural history and combines numerous approaches to wide-ranging media such as drawings, painting and sculpture, supported by research on mythology, botany and colonial histories. He trained in visual arts and completed the SOMA educational project in Mexico City. His work has included solo and collective shows in Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal and the United States. Standout solo shows include 2023’s Offerings to the nocturnal hours at CLEARING, in Brussels, Casa de sombras at Pequod.Co in Mexico City, between 2022 and 2023; and Las rodillas del ciprés, from 2022, at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro. Beyond the Arenas at the Arizona State University Museum, from 2022 to 2023; Drawing in the Continuous Present at New York’s The Drawing Center, in 2022; and 2020’s Otrxs Mundxs at Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo (2020) figured among the artist’s most notable collective exhibitions. 2022 saw Barrios publish his book of drawings, Buddhist visions of Hell, in collaboration with independent publisher Chez rosi. 

Biombo de la batalla, 2024
Watercolor and ink on paper, mounted on a wooden screen

The series of drawings on cotton paper represents a chaotic battle between fantastical beings inspired by animals and plants. With this work, the artist continues the trajectory that has led him to explore the relationships and tensions between human beings and the plant kingdom. Unlike in previous works, where orchids embody monsters, dark deities, and underworld demons that fight humans, this screen depicts a confrontation without clear armies or sides. This violent confrontation takes on cosmic meaning, like an explosion that creates worlds. In almost illegible handwriting, the back of the screen shows texts taken from the Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la Conquista (Vision of the Defeated. Indigenous Relations of the Conquest.) Also, a series of drawings with recurring motifs from Barrios’ work (belonging to the Buddhist Visions of Hell series) have been placed in different public spaces in León and Guanajuato leading up to the Biennial as posters. Part of the artist’s proposal is establishing a relationship between exhibition spaces and public ones through drawings. 

Buddhist Visions of Hell, 2019 – present
Selection of drawings

These drawings from the series Buddhist Visions of Hell feature recurring elements from Javier Barrios’ work. The drawings have been made into posters hung in public spaces around León and Guanajuato during the Biennial. In conversation with his project Biombo de la batalla, 2024, on display at the Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato, the artist links exhibition and public spaces through drawing. 

In her practice, Francisca Benítez uses video, photography, performance, installations and drawings to investigate relations between space, politics and language at the same time she links intimately to the places she lives and the communities with which she interacts. Benítez holds an MFA from Hunter College as well as an MA in architecture from the Universidad de Chile. Her work has exhibited at galleries, museums, biennials and has been acquired by numerous institutional collections. Standout solo shows include Direct Action at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture, in 2023; 2022’s Riego at Die ecke in Santiago; and New/Now at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, from 2017 to 2018. Her participation at collective exhibitions includes In Support at New York’s The Kitchen from 2021 to 2022 and Uprisings at Jeu de Paume in Paris from 2016 to 2017; among others. Benítez sings alto in Reverend Billy & The Stop Shopping Choir, an anti-capitalist gospel, performance and direct-action group based in New York, where she has lived since 1998.

Estudios de rimas por las formas de la mano, 2024
42 modified photographs
Risograph print, edits in graphite

In collaboration with the Centro de Educación Especial para Sordos y Lengua de Señas Mexicana A.C.–CESLSM (Special Education Center for the Deaf and Mexican Sign Language Association)

In voiceless poetry, rhymes are not determined by the sounds at the ends of words, but by the repeating shapes that hands make at the start of words. Each of the photographs shows common hand shapes in different sign languages, alongside interventions made by children as part of a deaf poetry workshop in collaboration with the Centro de Educación Especial para Sordos y Lengua de Señas Mexicana (Special Education Center for the Deaf and Mexican Sign Language Association of León). The words written on the images rhyme in Mexican Sign Language by using the same hand shapes in different positions and movements.

Décimas telúricas, 2010
Video (color, sound)
2 min. 24 sec.
Chilean Sign Language interpretation by Pamela Montero

Pichingal está temblando
bajo la luna plateada
la paz con la que soñaba
se me estaría acabando
de la cama voy saltando
corriendo sobre el rocío
temiendo más por los míos
que aún están allá adentro
por qué correrán tan lento?
en la tierra hoy no confío

Y se ha largado con furia
el suelo da latigazos
mi alma a cada zarpazo
se contrae sin lujuria
y se adentra en la penuria
que esto va significando
mi madre me está abrazando
mi padre viene corriendo
y juntos vamos sintiendo
que el mundo se está acabando

Pachamama enrarecida
hoy día te desconozco
me tratas como un vil mosco
sacudiendo tus entrañas
y las tierras aledañas
se van llenando de grietas
hasta las aguas más quietas
se vuelven ya un maremoto
somos un paisaje roto
el corazón se me aprieta

Cuando el rugido se calla
Levantamos campamento
y dónde fue el epicentro
va preguntando mi hermana
a las cinco ‘e la mañana
radio empieza transmisión
diciendo que en Concepción
‘tá la madre del cordero
el centro del hervidero
que azota en esta ocasión

Fue peor qu’el 85
mi abuela lo corrobora
la ciencia dice que ahora
las placas dieron más brincos
y con harto más ahínco
Llora mi tierra Maulina
del Bío-bío vecina
este día desolado
del adobe derrumbado
qu’en la penumbra asesina.

Has dado al mundo tus canciones, 2018
Poem with hand shapes for 1 through 10 in ASL
Video (color, no sound)
1 min. 51 seg.
Diagram on paper: transcription in SignWriting, translation in English and Spanish
Digital inkjet printing with long-lasting pigment on acid-free paper

In this video, Francisca Benítez recites a poem she authored in American Sign Language (ASL), with a lithograph as its starting point. In I Have Given the World My Songs (1947), Elizabeth Catlett referred to the struggle for Black liberation and the role of artists within the movement. For this poem, Benítez uses hand shapes, organized in a sequence from one to ten, representing the craft of deaf poetry as well as the “tenth” verse style in the Latin American poetic tradition. 

The video is accompanied by a paper diagram containing the transcription of the poem created in SignWriting, a sign system for movement notation, and sign languages created by Valerie Sutton in 1974, as well as translations into English and Spanish. This poetic piece arose from a collaboration with Douglas Ridloff on a performance at the Whitney Museum in 2018. 

Her work focuses on revising and simultaneously integrating cosmovisions, study and ancestral practices. Re-reading hidden or enigmatic elements, she interweaves a bridge to past knowledge using exploration tools such as astrology, numerology, chiromancy and graphology. She studied visual arts at the Universidad de Guadalajara before exhibiting at both solo and collective shows throughout Mexico, at museums such as the Museo Anahuacalli, in Mexico City; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro; the Museo de Arte de Zapopan; Guadalajara’s Museo Cabañas; as well as the Museo de las Artes; the Museo de la Ciudad; the Museo de Pintores, in Oaxaca; the Museo Raúl Anguiano; and the Museo Taller Clemente Orozco. Outside Mexico, Carrillo has presented work at ANRA Künstlerhaus in Lottstetten, Germany; Art Movement in Los Angeles; London’s Bass & Baum Gallery; Miami’s Bass Museum of Art; Bessarabska Square in Kiev; Cuadro22 in Chur, Switzerland; the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice; Austin’s Museum of Human Art; the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center; OVAL/Lingotto Fiere in Turin; the Pomona College Art Museum at Claremont, California; New York’s PROXYCO Gallery; the Stewart Hall Art Gallery in Québec; Barcelona’s The Green Parrot; among others. She was awarded a grant from the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México.

Resonancias de la montaña, 2024
Polyptych of 9 hand-dyed wool tapestries

Patrones de resonancias, 2024
Polyptych of 9 embroideries on wool, hand-dyed cotton, and silk

These works from Isa Carrillo represent the mountain’s energy in nine different “resonances.” The repetitive acts of weaving and embroidery create expansions and contractions, like a heartbeat that moves rhythmically and naturally. This work also explores the silence, repose, and rooting process of making a piece—a kind of homage to the art of textile production that traverses eras, cultures, and styles. The work is a tribute to the hands and natural materials that express life’s energy in textiles—an energy that resonates in the designs transmitted in this work. 

Multidisciplinary artist who develops work that oscillates between the performing and visual arts. She explores themes like documenting movement and time’s passage, the body’s performative presence and its projection in architecture. She studied visual arts at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s national school for the plastic arts and holds an MFA from DasArts in Amsterdam. The artist’s drawing and movement laboratory—presented at numerous universities and art spaces in Mexico and the United States—is a fundamental part of her practice. She has exhibited work at Mexican venues such as Arte Abierto, Casa Wabi, the Hospicio Cabañas, the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, the Museo Jumex, the Museo Tamayo, the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and Teatro de Danza. Collective exhibition spaces outside Mexico have included Assembly, in New York; the Center for the Arts and Communication at Art Basel, Miami; Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst; the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis; and YYZ in Toronto; among others. The McKnight Foundation chose Eibenschutz as its choreographer and she also formed part of the SOMA docent team from 2016 to 2019. She is currently a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México.

7 días + 1, 2023
Indigo pigment and oil pastel on canvas

Y vas cobrando forma en el hogar que habito, 2024
Installation
White pastel on black wall and audio
Sound design: Martin de Torcy
Choir direction: Moisés Mata Piña
Translation of graphic score to musical score: Michelle Naomi Rocha Zendejas
Illustrations and voices: Daniela Guadalupe Vázquez Ramírez, Diego Alejandro Rojas, Diego Tadeo Rodríguez Santoyo, Erick Gerardo Hernández Arellano, Goretti del Rocío Flores Rocha, Josué Guzmán Delgado, Layla Briseida Galván Castro, Michelle Naomi Rocha Zendejas and Osmara Nicole Mata Parra

Central to Galia Eibenschutz’s practice are workshops designed for specific groups in which she explores the relationship between the body and drawing. In this installation, the artist starts with a series of five drawings associated with the vowels of the alphabet and whose creation follows a particular bodily movement. The drawings, repeated and organized in different ways, gave rise to a graphic score later translated into a musical score during a workshop with nine singers from the Fundación León youth choir. The result is a piece composed of recorded vocal sounds and drawn lines recreated in situ on five walls by the choir.

* Beneficiary of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Art (National Art Creators System) 2023-26, part of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (Support System for Creative and Cultural Projects). 

Visual artist who uses photography, video, sculpture and writing to investigate how extractive and criminal economies materially transform territory at the same time he researches the historical links between environmental catastrophe, organized crime and forced disappearance. In Mexico his work has been shown at Casa del Lago, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Museo Jumex; outside Mexico he has exhibited at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut; Ballroom Marfa in Texas; Frac Centre-Val de Loire in Orleans; the Museo Artium in Vitoria, Spain; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo; New York’s Storefront for Art & Architecture; Spazio Veda in Florence; the Wren Library and Whitechapel Gallery, both in the UK; among others. He completed professional residencies at PAOS (Guadalajara) and Casa Gallina-InSite. Fernández de Castro received an Open Society Foundation grant in 2023 and a three-year support from the Digital Borderlands-Mellon Foundation between 2021 and 2023. He has received two Jóvenes Creadores grants from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, in 2011 and 2019, and has been a member of that country’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de Mexico since 2022. The artist is also the co-founder at the Centro de Investigaciones del Desierto de Altar. He lives and works in Altar, Sonora.

Los bárbaros, 2024
Two-channel video installation (color, sound)
15 min. 20 sec.
Production: Miguel Fernández de Castro
Editing: Fernando Portillo
Photography: Miguel Fernández de Castro and Fernando Portillo
Direct sound: Juan Celaya and Natalia Mendoza
Color and sound design: Estudio El Pinacate
Translation from Spanish to O’odham: Rafael Garcia
Local production: Janeth Caballero, Juana Federico, Rafael García, Ariel Méndez, Javier Mendoza, and Lico
Archive video: US Customs Recruit Native Indian Trackers in Drugs Battle, AP, 1996

The artist bases this work on the Great Altar Desert in Sonora, analyzing conditions that have drastically altered the physiognomy of the landscape. Starting with an image, the project spurs broad imaginations about the border, identity ties, language, and belonging, focusing on the conditions of the Tohono O’odham native nation, historically divided by the US-Mexico border.

The video installation contrasts the territory’s concerns, presenting an original fragment and a recreation of a report from the 1990s about an operation in which the United States Border Patrol hired members of the Tohono O’odham community to track down signs of drug traffickers in the desert. People from the community traveled the landscape on horseback in search of footprints that showed anomalies affecting the “natural state” of the land. In the recreation, the artist’s mother, a chronicler of the region, repeats phrases from the original video. Also, a series of closed shots presents objects seen by Fernández de Castro in 2017 during a visit to San Francisquito, an O’odham town, 7 km from the border, after the abrupt forced displacement of its inhabitants due to the violence. On a white background and forensic lighting, the artist recreates his memories of this disconcerting encounter and displays vestiges of the moment—organic and animal waste, and weapons–at the center. In this work, Fernández de Castro questions of the possibility of representing and elaborating experiences of violence.

* Beneficiary of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Art (National Art Creators System) 2023-26, part of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (Support System for Creative and Cultural Projects). 

Artist, arts promoter and curator whose work comes from interest in official historic narrative and the counter-stories that specific micro-histories offer. Combined images, texts and readings articulate the artist’s work. In a cross between narrative, essay and poetry, she has written for her own performances and those of other artists, written for magazines, exhibits, catalogues and collective exhibit publications. She has worked as co-director—alongside Oscar Formacio—at the ERROR independent space in Puebla and Mexico City; and since 2018, in partnership with Ana Gallardo, she has coordinated the IMÁN independent-studies program. Her work has exhibited in museums, festivals and galleries everywhere from Albania to Belgium, China, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Serbia and Spain. Since 2016, she has partnered with Puebla’s Museo Amparo as an academic and curation coordinator for wide-ranging public programs and projects. She has worked as a teacher, curator and consultant at numerous public and private institutions, independent spaces and training programs in Mexico and Italy, among other countries. She is currently an undergraduate contemporary art professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

Pistas para historias de piel (un guión en cien microactos), 2024
Installation
Acrylic painting on cotton backdrop, publication, and video (color, sound)

Nina Fiocco’s practice centers on field research and collaboration. During the months leading up to the Biennial, Fiocco compiled 100 microhistories linked to mining, tanning, maquila, sex work, slavery, and regional economies, based on interviews conducted with people in León and Guanajuato. The project arises from an interest in storytelling as a form of political agency. Beyond truth-telling, it seeks to challenge the idea of ​​oral histories as unreliable and, rather, consider them primary sources. A fabric displays selections from the 100 microstories, and the stories can be consulted in their entirety in a publication available in the exposition room. In a video, child narrator Alexander Arreola Subias reinterprets some of these stories. Fiocco collaborated with the radio station at the University of Guanajuato (Radio UG), where different people will enact the stories daily. In addition, Laura Casillas will hold an oral storytelling workshop during the Biennial.

The stories in this project were written in collaboration with Iraís Cortés López, Miranda de los Ángeles Espinosa Giles, Victoria Elizondo, Atza Escalante Zamorano, and Shoko Wen, and in conversation with Enrique Arriola, Laura Casillas, Miguel Ángel Collazo, Eduardo Cornejo, Víctor Hermosillo, Mario Ibarra, Taniel Morales, Liliana Pérez Estrada, Juan Carlos Porras y Manrique, Jaime Ruíz Martínez, Irving de Jesús Segovia Pérez “Tuxamee”, Judith Scarpulli Moguel, Elizabeth Subias Pérez, Isis Yépez, José Eduardo Vidaurri, and many others.

Artist, arts promotor and docent. Her quest as an artist and her private-life vicissitudes are keenly inseparable. She takes on different planes of violence and is currently focused on the violence of getting old. Her recent solo exhibitions include (Te busco en otro nombre). Bitácora guatemalteca 1987/2022, that won the 2023 Premio de Arte Julius Baer a las Artistas Latinoamericanas prize at the Museo de Arte de Bogotá; as well as Escuela de envejecer, presented at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires in 2022, after a 2018 exhibition of the same project as part of Ágora: un anteproyecto para la utopía at Mexico City’s Museo Jumex; alongside 2015’s Un lugar para vivir cuando seamos viejos at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. She participated in the twelfth Bienal del Mercosur, in 2020; 2019’s thirteenth Bienal de La Habana; the 2015 sixty-fifth Venice Biennial; and the twenty-ninth Bienal de São Paulo in 2010; among others. In recent years she has organized independent spaces, such as Periférico and El Espacio Forest, the first-ever self-managed art-space fairs. She is a SOMA docent and directs the Imán and La Verdi projects in Mexico City, where she currently lives.

Lidia, 2006
Chalk on wall, photo, and printed text
Collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (donation from Banco Supervielle, 2022)

Escuela de envejecer, 2024
Installation
Videos, stage, benches, and wall art

In collaboration with the Memorias de Mi Barrio collective (Lluvia Estela Jacobo Juárez, Imylce Morales Carmona, Silvia Rodríguez Fuentes, and Paulina del Carmen Quintana Reyes), Gustavo Crivilone, Francisco Javier González Robledo, M. de la Luz Hernández García, Luz María del Refugio Rivera Nava, Judith Scarpulli Moguel, and Ignacio Rivera Heredia

In this long-term project, Gallardo reflects, alongside others, about old age, a stage of life socially stigmatized for being “unproductive–” especially for women and societal outsiders. The artist organizes dialogues between older adults who detail desires that have been silenced or denied by social, political, or religious mandates. Participants end up forming emotional and social bonds through the process, and the conversations turn into performances, in which participants publicly share their ideas. 

Videos on screens show some of the Escuela de envejecer processes in different cities over the years. Another video demonstrates the process with women from León, and Lidia represents the first years in which the artist was reflecting on old age and womanhood. The conversations center on storytelling, specifically, memories of love.

Artist whose practice links to social participation processes related to education and collective knowledge, to which end he applies different knowledge-production and -organization methodologies, particularly tequio, an Indigenous collective work structure largely rooted in Oaxaca. He trained at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s school of art and design, in its Medios Múltiples seminar, and was artist-in-residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. His work has been shown in collective exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern, in Switzerland; the Museo Universitario de Art Contemporáneo and the Museo Tamayo, both in Mexico City; in addition to the Netherlands’ VanAbbe Museum. In 2022 Godínez Nivón won the Prince Claus Mentorship Award from the Prince Claus Fund & Goethe-Institut. That year also saw the artist represent Mexico at the 23rd Triennale di Milano’s international exhibition, where he came in at second place for best pavilion. He is currently a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México.

El sueño del oyamel, 2024
Video (black and white, sound)
17 min. 17 sec.

In collaboration with Leonor Ramírez, León Rodríguez, and the Hñähñü community of San Ildefonso Cieneguilla, Tierra Blanca, Guanajuato
Additional participants: Margarita García, J. Guadalupe Hernández Suarez, Dulce María Hernández Urias, Harif Emanuel Hernández Urias, Nadia Rodríguez Ramírez, Diana Urias Morales, Patricia Guadalupe Urias Morales, and Toribio Viñes Félix
Advisor: Edgar Pedro Méndez Vázquez, professor at Centro Interdisciplinario del Noreste de la Universidad de Guanajuato
Documentation and registration: Alena Kolesnikova
Photography and editing: Sergio Urcino
Registration and second camera: Alena Kolesnikova
Color correction: David Camargo and Sergio Urcino
Original music and sound design: Fernando Vigueras
Song: “Dya dehehū” (We Are Water)
Creators: Nadia Rodriguez Ramirez (däzabi) and Gabriel Ricardo de Dios Figueroa
Performers: Leonor Ramírez and Nadia Rodríguez
Direct Sound: Mauricio Orduña
Production and museography: Mirna Castro

Appealing to the power of the dreamlike, this video installation links ancestral wisdom and community action. Inspired by dreams that reflect the memory and aspirations of the earth itself, the film bears witness to the resilience that enables our interdependence with the nature that surrounds and sustains us. Through this project, a community reimagines and rebuilds its relationship with the “oyamels” (fir trees), while sowing a future for generations to come. 

Ojo de agua, 2024
Stone and cistern water
In collaboration with Harif Emanuel Hernández Urias

Ojo de agua is an artistic intervention in the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato’s historic cistern, which, for more than 200 years, has collected rainwater and seepage from an adjacent hill. This structure, which now houses and sustains a unique ecosystem of microorganisms, is transformed, thanks to the incorporation of a stone from the Sierra Gorda embedded with Cinco Llagas seeds. The Cinco Llagas plant has significant sacred importance to the Hñähñu people, and this artistic intervention seeks to release water from the cistern, creating a link between stagnant water and its natural cycles. The act reflects the deep interconnection between nature and culture by invoking a dialogue between the hill, the water, and the clouds.

Visual artist whose practice centers on awareness and recuperation of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec’s traditional garments, by means of the surroundings where she lives and her interest in phenomena such as migration, geography and identity, all of which have emerged from personal interests and her move into community-based knowledge exchange. She is a graduate of the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Oaxaca as well as the Clínicas de Especalización en Arte Contemporáneo and has also trained at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca. She has participated in exhibitions in Ecuador, Mexico, Spain and the United States as well as in several other countries. Her recent standout shows include Historias indígenas, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, in 2023; in the same year, Reflejos del istmo was shown at the Museo de Filatelia de Oaxaca. In addition to its 2019 exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo del Chopo, Los huecos del agua exhibited at both Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art as well as at the Museo Amparo, in Puebla, in 2023. Hernández additionally presented Riaba Riasa—as an invited artist—at Salón ACME 10 in Mexico City, also in 2023; Disrupciones indígenas. Arte de los pueblos de México, was shown at the same city’s Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes; in 2014, she presented New codex at the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Los Angeles.

Xquipi (Navel), 2024
Gourd rind and agave fibers

Redasilú (Vendrá la memoria), 2024
Installation
Obsidian, gold, wax, snail shells, graphite, pigments, copper, and clay on 68 gourd husks; agave fibers and audio

68 gourd husks are interwoven with agave fibers and 11 other materials from the earth. The number of husks and other materials correspond, respectively, to the number of Indigenous languages ​​and linguistic families that, in addition to Spanish, exist in the country. Using diverse materials, the artist presents the tension between constant loss and resistance, proposing that memories remain despite continuous processes of disappearance. This cluster of connections transposes and represents the nations and languages ​​in a place that’s considered a single nation: Mexico. Audio in Zapotec stating a manifesto about language and identity accompanies the installation, questioning who gets to have a voice and who has the capacity for representation. 

Visual artist whose work takes on the relation between historic and political memory-construction processes and the discursive and iconographic distortion of leftist thinking in Mexico. He is graduate of “La Esmeralda,” Mexico’s national painting, sculpture and engraving school. At numerous Mexico institutions he has presented work in solo and collective exhibitions such as El preludio de la ruptura, at the Centro Cultural Border; El ejercicio de las buenas voluntades, at Smith College’s Nixon Gallery in Southampton, Massachusetts; both Parasitage. Ruidos negros and Pintura reactiva at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, TROMBA at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo; Anverso at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte-MUCA Roma; La importancia de ser autosuficiente at Proyectos Monclovia; and México bárbaro at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, both in Mexico City. Shows outside Mexico included No sé qué es una casa at La Fugitiva in Havana and TEMPUS FUGAÇ/TEMPS APRECARI at VABD in Barcelona as well as at Juannio in Guatemala. He participated at the XVI Biennalle de Lyon in 2022 and 2023 as well as at the XIV Bienal de la Habana, from 2021 to 2022. Jiménez has received grants from numerous public and private institutions including the Programa BBVA Bancomer-MACG, three Jóvenes Creadores awards in 2011, 2015 and 2020, a Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico 2018 recognition and the 2016 Beca Adidas-Border grant. He is a Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte de México member. 

La muerte arquera y la alegría de vivir, 2024
Oil on wooden door, steel base with electrostatic paint

Totentanz, 2024
Plywood, automotive lacquer, varnish, steel, electrostatic paint, and leather
In collaboration with Edgardo Jiménez (Workshop-studio)

Totentanz, or danse macabre, is a late-medieval allegory from Western Europe that embodies the inevitability of death and in which death dances with people in an image. As seen in La muerte arquera, a 17th-century painting located in the pinacoteca (picture gallery) of the Templo de la Compañía in Guanajuato, New Spain replicated this representation from the Middle Ages. 

In this case, death is standing on tepetate, a kind of compacted red earth from the Guanajuato shoals. The bow death carries is not only a nod to the certainty of death but also to the speed with which it comes. In La muerte arquera y la alegría de vivir, Néstor Jiménez alludes to the piece from the Templo de la Compañía but replaces the scenes with those of everyday life, performed by primordial incarnated beings. The painting is also in conversation with Totentanz, an installation with figures that viewers can move around—a work that literally “dances” with the audience. Both pieces address an unnerving topic and portray a dance that no one can escape. 

*Beneficiary of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Art (National Art Creators System) 2023-26, part of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (Support System for Creative and Cultural Projects).

Uses media such as painting, drawing, installations and performance that embody her interest in colonial Mexico’s baroque period, adapting sacred and profane references to arrive at new narratives. In her work, she leverages syncretism to construct a visual vocabulary that evokes a theatrical feeling in compositions that blur the line between memory and fiction. She is a graduate from “La Esmeralda,” Mexico’s national painting, sculpture and engraving school. Recent solo exhibitions include Carmen, at High Art in Paris, 2023; Dressing chamber, from 2023 at Gaga, Art Basel Statements; La Misión, Gaga Los Angeles, 2022; and 2020’s La Compañía at Gaga in Mexico City. Ugly Painting at Nahmad Contemporary in New York, 2023; Creo en Dios, sólo que deletreo naturaleza at Lodos, Mexico City, 2021; 2020’s Sans Filet at Aoyama Meguro, in Tokyo and El mundo no es como nosotros, fue impuesto, intentamos transformarlo, from the same year and at Britta Rettberg in Munich, figured among the artist’s most notable recent collective exhibitions.  In partnership with Wendy Cabrera Rubio, she co-curated Capital Capital at Querétaro’s Galería Libertad, in 2018; and in the following year she presented Campamiento para Jóvenes Naturalistas at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro. She received a Jóvenes Creadores grant from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in 2019. 

Máquina-teatro, 2024
Installation
Metal structures, acrylic on cloth, and curtains

The structure of this theatrical device was inspired by items of play, especially merry-go-rounds and pop-up books. This theater machine seeks to open conversations around scenography as a mobile space capable of generating narratives, using landscapes and symbolic images to create the three potential scenes to accompany acting. 

Her work emerged amid experimental, theoretical and politicization contexts that characterized 1970s-era arts contexts, just as feminism began to take off in Mexican literary and artistic circles. She has focused on questioning painting as an affective expression, intimate reflection and formal construction field. She trained at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico’s national school of plastic art and was a member of the Março group. Standout solo and collective exhibitions include Radical Women: Latin American Art: 1960-1985, an itinerant exhibition with stints at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in 2017, as well as in 2018 at both the Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Del verbo estar at Mexico City’s Museo Universitario del Chopo, in 2017; Intimidad del jardín. Pinturas 1985-2016 at the Museo Jardín Borda in Cuernavaca, 2016; and 2004’s Mi versión de los hechos at the Museo de Ciencias y Artes in Mexico City. Many of Lara’s artworks have been integrated into major public and private collections at institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art as well as the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, in Mexico City, whose Arkheia documentation center now holds a Magali Lara/Elso archival collection.

Leteo, 2024
Installation
Wall art with linoleum cutouts and pencil drawings, pastel with paper cutouts

In Greek mythology, Lethe (Leteo) is the name of the river that spurs oblivion, whose water souls drink before reincarnating themselves. It is also the title of one of the sections of Gloria Gervitz’s long poem, “Migrations,” which the poet wrote over the course of 40 years and which alludes to the transition into death—an act that, consequently, leaves room for something new. Gervitz’s unique literary process, in which she spent decades rewriting the same poem, echoes ideas about the unfinished present in Magali Lara’s practice of drawing (an act the artist also views as a form of writing). Black silhouettes on the walls and floors overflow from the drawings in the rooms, giving the sensation of something advancing, transforming, and leaving a wake, like a river. 

Her artworks first unfold from the body and intimacy. She uses ritual as a medium for intoning existence and shredding up vestiges of the quotidian, maternity, grief and vulnerability. A graduate of the Centro de Estudios Superiores de Diseño de Monterrey, she co-founded La Orgía and La Compañía, independent groups focused on Monterrey-based contemporary art production, study and awareness. Throughout 2018 she was a participant at that city’s Lugar Común, where she served as AIKIDO’s formative-processes coordinator. Her work has been shown in Barcelona, Düsseldorf and Saint Étienne, as well as at numerous cultural and exhibition spaces in Mexico City and Monterrey, such as the Casa de la Cultura de Nuevo León, the Centro de las Artes de Nuevo León, the Centro Cultural Plaza Fátima, the Colegio Civil Centro Cultural Universitario, El Cuarto de Máquinas, Galería Karen Huber, guadalajara90210, the Museo El Centenario Monterrey, Museo MARCO, Salon ACME and YNGSPC. Lee Betancourt enjoys support and recognition from several public and private institutions such as Las Artes Monterrey, la Bienal de Arte Joven, the CONARTE Reseña de Nuevo León, KADIST and the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo.

Madre de noche (from the series Nana), 2021
Watercolor, pastel, ink on linen, brass, and beeswax

Sobreproducción (from the series Nana), 2021
Watercolor, pastel, and ink on linen

Let-down (from the series Nana), 2021
Watercolor, pastel, and ink on linen

Al cuerpo que se vierte, que palpita, que canta, 2024
Installation
5 beeswax, pigment, and brass sculptures on metal bases

Performance: Daniela Martínez, Eugenia Gallegos, Bianca González, Luz Loya, Andrea Reyna, and Lluvia Villalpando, directed by Carolina Espíndola (members of the la Compañía Guayacán)

Al cuerpo que se vierte, que palpita, que canta comprises a series of metal sculptures that integrate brass and pigmented wax and explore the relationships between rituality, calm, and care. The audio is from a performance exploring sound and healing through vibrations that immerse participants in a sacred space where sound becomes tangible. Within this sculpture room, or “circle that shelters,” the tones and frequencies of a lullaby are enacted through a ritual of movement, words, and bodily connection.

Interdisciplinary visual artist whose work explores the dialogue between the visual arts, music and material history, using image and sound as tools for research, production and collaboration. In addition to holding degrees from the national school for the cinematographic arts at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as well as from “La Esmeralda,” Mexico’s national painting, sculpture and engraving school, Lorena Mal has participated as an artist-in-residence in France, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. In Mexico, her work has been exhibited at spaces such as the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco, ESPAC, Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, the Museo Amparo and Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. Internationally, her work has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California; Biobat Artspace; the Brooklyn Army Terminal; Meinblau in Berlin; the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Smith Gallery in North Carolina. She has received three Jóvenes Creadores grants from the Fondo de Cultura para las Artes, in 2011, 2016 and 2018, won first place at 2013’s Concurso Internacional de Video y Arte Electrónico Transitio, in addition to a 2012 grant from the Programa de Investigación y Producción en Arte y Medios  platform.

Restregarnos tierra en los ojos, 2024
Mural made from dirt from Santa Rosa, Guanajuato

Líneas de árbol (Bajío), 2024
Drawing on wood and mural with clays from Chupícuaro, Acámbaro, Puruaguita, San José Rincón, Las Tinajas, Cerro del Toro, Jerécuaro, La Purísima, Tarandacuao, Cañitas, Dolores, San Anton de las Minas, Santa Rosa de Lima, Los Mexicanos, Valenciana, and Guanajuato

Troncos (after Feliciano Peña, 1944), 2024
Volcanic stone, powdered marble, and polylactic acid

Restregarnos tierra en los ojos (Habitar dentro de una vasija), 2024
C-print on archival paper and drawing with clay

Anthropomorphic vessel, Chupícuaro. Clay. Museo Regional de Guanajuato, Alhóndiga de Granaditas collection. Image from INAH Media Library

Production: Laboratorio de Arte, Arquitectura y Arqueología (LAAA) and Estudio Terra Cromática (Sofía García Ramírez, Diana Laura Guevara Ramírez, Auriane Eléonore Martha Gorry, Ariadna Brasilia Hernández Ponciano, and Pauline Vercruysse).

Viewing the landscape and land as an archive, this project explores the memories that materials and places maintain on their own, as well as the traces that remain as a result of inhabitation and manipulation. As a whole, the pieces consider the history of Alhóndiga (originally a seed warehouse), which now houses objects from the region, such as Chupícuara pottery. The clays that cover the walls of the room come from various areas of the state of Guanajuato and were collected by the artist in collaboration with researchers from the National Laboratory of Sciences for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Laboratorio Nacional de Ciencias para la Investigación y Conservación del Patrimonio Cultural–LANCIC, in Spanish), who are analyzing them as a presumed aspect of the Chupícuaro culture. The wooden mural referencing rings of trees in the Bajío region, such as white cedar, fir, naranjillo, plum, oak, and capulincillo, as well as the sculpture of a rotting trunk, allude to the passage of time and life cycles. 

Using paintings, drawings and installations, work by Josué Mejía starts out from historical revisions to analyze how narratives from the past are produced and established. He studied visual arts at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s national plastic arts school and was part of the 2020 graduating class at the Programa Educativa SOMA. His work has shown at solo exhibitions in Mexico at spaces including Proyectos Monclova, in 2023; at the Museo Jumex as well as guadalajara90210, both in 2022. Two 2023 exhibitions—at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, alongside participation in the 22nd Bienal de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Videobrasil, in São Paulo—in addition to a 2021 show at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, South Carolina; as well as another at Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo figured among the artist’s most notable recent collective exhibitions. He received two Jóvenes Creadores grants from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in 2018 and 2021.

Presagios en vuelo sobre pisos de madera, 2024
Installation
Metal, drawing on paper, wood, steel, hose, plastic, 3D resin printing, and clock modified using animation

Josué Mejía’s work explores the visual imagination of modernity, turning to emblematic artists of modern art and representations in the media. In this piece, he animates the painting México negro (1942) by Guanajuato artist José Chávez Morado, as a harbinger of the industrial future of Bajío and Mexico. He focuses on two of the primary elements of the painting. An ox skeleton, the main character of an animated video, is housed inside a clock—a representation of the workday. The narrative follows the creature as it drinks a black liquid (a reference to the petroleum derivatives produced in Salamanca) until it is reduced to bones. The other element contains flying paintings (set in motion mechanically) that bear caricatures exploring industrial oil and automotive manufacturing processes on their wings. The set explores the anthropomorphic possibilities of machines and factories while commenting on production in relation to time, automation, and labor.

Socio-plastic practitioner who leverages visual, sound, body and pedagogic art to focus on a transformation from our idea of reality along three principal lines, specifically, de-automating common sense, non-estrangement from human links and propitiating autonomy exercises. He thinks of art as a territory where we can develop previously unthinkable processes in other knowledge fields. Morales graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s national plastic arts school and later wrote Manual para maestros que lloran por las noches. He has published numerous articles, conducted workshops and participated in socio-plastic projects in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Poland, the United States and Venezuela.

Tótem. Dentro, fuera de la piel, 2024
Morphing installation
Documentation, ceramics, paper, and vestiges from social art workshops

Taniel Morales’ work focuses on social art, linking people in the creative process. For the artist, the borders between pedagogy and artistic practice are blurred, and he considers workshops another medium of contemporary art. 

The materials in the exhibition room are part of Tótem, a piece made up of eight endogenous education workshops carried out in the weeks leading up to the Biennial in various places around Guanajuato, in which each group built the knowledge and tools they needed. Through participation, the workshops explored three fields: urgency (personal and collective), methods of organizations, and the idea of ​​reality.

The workshops were carried out in collaboration with groups in León, Guanajuato, Xichú, Pozos, San Miguel Allende, and Salamanca. 

The project is part of a months-long conversation between Morales, Nina Fiocco, and Jaime Ruíz Martínez, in which they created a shared process named Piel (Skin), referencing skin’s meaning, according to some Totonac communities, as the center—not the limit—of the body, putting the body in a unique relationship with that which is outside of it. 

Visual artist, curator and docent who holds an MA from the University of Guanajuato. Her last exhibition, 2023’s Lupercalia Indómita, at guadalajara90210 in Mexico City, puts the ways we materialize social accords in tension with certain attitudes that are naturally untamed. She served as coordinator at the independent art space Obra Negra from 2018 to 2020 and founded the Programa de Producción Artística (PROA), given over to preserving and promoting contemporary arts practice in Mexico’s Bajío region. Her artistic practice received a grant from the Programa de Estímulo de la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico, in 2017, after receiving a 2015 Jóvenes Creadores program grant from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. As PROA coordinator, she received different grants on behalf of independent spaces, from donors such as the Guanajuato Ministry of Culture, the Instituto Estatal de la Cultura de Guanajuato and the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo. Between 2013 and 2018 she formed part of the docents team at the Universidad de Guanajuato’s visual arts department. She is currently a member of the Colectivo Dolores Hidalgo. 

Wildlife Insights (Avistamiento del encuentro salvaje), 2024
Installation
Mechanical structure, command controls, inflatable canvas, modified synthetic hides, outfit, and single-channel video

Wildlife Insights reflects on encounters between the human body and the wild. Using a mechanical bull covered with different modified synthetic hides, the artist questions the body, skin, stigmata, and the body-machine-animal relationship. The work also explores distinct ways of framing the gaze. Wildlife Insights recreates a diorama in the style of natural history museums that contextualizes ecosystems and ways of life. The set-up frames different constructions of desire and creates tension by making the contents inaccessible. The accompanying video/performance responds to cinema and digital culture, depicting an encounter between a woman and the mechanical bull. The video, which highlights the sensuality of the exchange, challenges archetypal knowledge about the feminine, ferocity, domination, and seduction. 

Visual artist affiliated with community and pedagogic practices. He co-founded Lugar Común—still active since its 2011 Oaxaca inauguration—a neighborhood group for investigating possible adaptations between community self-organization and citizen participation in urban life. The group was part of the Arts Collaboratory international network from 2016 to 2018. In 2023 Ruiz Martínez participated in the Learning Contexts program at Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive AAA after doing a 2022 documenta 15 Notes on Education residency in Kassel, Germany. He received two Jóvenes Creadores grants from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, in 2014 and 2018, for projects that relate the rural and the urban in line with social, climatic and community dimensions. He directed the Museo Tamayo’s education and public programs department from 2019 to 2023.

Tiempo de ganar, 2024
Wall painting and mixed media polyptych

Artistic-pedagogical processes lead to reflections on collective work in contemporary art, which has been historically focused on the value of authorship and individual production. The drawings and diagrams in this exhibition room hail from Tiempo de ganar: programa de entrenamiento de principios asociativos e intuiciones colectivas (Time to Win: A Training Program for Associative Principles and Collective Intuitions), an artistic-pedagogical program based on play, basketball logic, and the notion of training. This collection shares reflections and other content arising from conversations with people when designing the training program (which will take place during the Biennial) and through collaboration with Alejandra Arellano, former professional player, coach, and founder of León’s “Panteras” team. 

The artist’s interest in basketball is linked to personal experience, having practiced the sport in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, where basketball is deeply linked to regional community traditions. Applying artistic reflections to sports allows us to think about body language ​​and mutual trust, tools that encourage the dissolution of individualism, and the dynamics of basketball—exploring new approaches to collective conceits in artistic processes. 

Visual artist who largely works with drawing and sculpture, with an interest in land-related as well as desert-theft issues in Mexico. The artist participated in the SOMA educational project’s contemporary art strategies and production processes program and completed a plastic arts BA at the Universidad de Sonora. She has been the subject of seven different solo shows, specifically Bestial, from 2022; 2019’s Cascabel; Estío (2018); Paisaje negro (2017); Memoria devastada (2017), Detritos. Vestigios de la arena, presented in 2016; and 2013’s El cártel de los pesados. Work from 2018 at M 74, a Mexico City sculptural space; Con aire popular at Madrid’s Casa de México, in 2020; Tierra ignota at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro, 2020; and Separated by Borders at Tucson, Arizona’s Pima Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery, from 2019, figured among the artist’s most notable recent collective exhibitions. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.

Detonaciones, 2024
Engine, metal structure, leather, recovered firearm casings, and PLA-CF 3D prints

Miriam Salado’s practice explores human interventions in nature. In archaeological exercises, Salado works with materials found while exploring landscapes (primarily, Sonoran ones) and synthesizes experiences that occur within that same environment as an installation. Through drawing and sculpture, she addresses relationships between identity, cultural production, and the illicit, starting with a local context and echoing globally. Detonaciones consists of a mechanical totem covered in leather and recovered firearm casings. Through movement and sound, this hybrid work explores armor, threats, predators, and animals. 

Interdisciplinary artist who works with sound art, experimental music, graphics, ceramics, video and installation. She leverages error, repetition, disruption and hoarding as creative tools at the same time she evinces particular interest in the physical and psychological effects sound has on humans. She often works with the written word and her projects are generally presented in printed form. She uses the pseudonym Ana Fauna for music productions and live performances. In 2022 she was a sound artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, and her work has been exhibited in spaces such as Ex Teresa Arte Actual, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, the Museo de Arte de Zapopan and Mexico City’s Museo del Chopo, among others. She received a Jóvenes Creadores grant from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, as well as from the Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico, and also received a Creadores de la Paz grant for her project Resiliencia. Santana is founder and director at O.Y.E. Oficio y Experimentación, a space for experimental arts promotion in Zapopan, Jalisco. 

Own Voice: una escucha profunda a la voz humana, 2024
Condenser microphones, headphones, mixer, Touch Board, conductive ink, vinyl, wiring, table, and chairs

Although we use our voice every day, we are not so familiar with it that we can describe it precisely. In an exercise in listening and corporality based on long-term research, Santana invites us to reflect on the perception of our voice through an interview we can access through a closed circuit. 

Cada iteración, 2024
Acrylic on canvas

This graphic composition performs twelve frequency analyses of the artist’s voice. Santana recorded herself saying the phrase “cada iteración” (“each iteration”) during different days, times, and contexts. The piece considers the impossibility of saying the same thing in the same way, since our voice is conditioned by the most subtle factors, such as the presence of light and ambient noise or the time and day. 

Artist and collaborative writer, editor and educator for an array of initiatives whose work is composed of drawings, texts, sculptures and live performance. In his projects he positions reading as an authorial task that is not limited to a receptive activity. He also connects to literature’s parallel professions—editing, translating, illustration—to create conditions that allow a more complex understanding of written culture. He received an MFA at the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel and was a SOMA Programa Educativo participant. In Mexico, his work has shown in collective exhibitions at Guadalajara’s Museo Cabañas in 2022 and at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City, in 2021. His work has been exhibited outside Mexico at the Castello di Rivoli, in Turin, 2023; Barcelona’s La Capella in 2022 and at the Denver Art Museum in 2021. He has published two books: Fábula encinta (Gato Negro 2021) concerns the metaphor of male pregnancy and its instrumentalization in literary endeavor; Nonverbal (Gato Negro 2019) is his first self-illustrated book. 

Juegos florales, 2024
Installation and open mic performance
Polystyrene sculptures on-screen lined with green felt; cast brass figurines, engraved folding chairs, and polyester suit

The floral games are literary competitions held since the Middle Ages to recognize the best poet in a region. In some places, the jury awarded a golden rose as the prize. In Mexico, these types of contests remain as government initiatives that link cultural production with political objectives. Juegos florales is a contest—just with a few modifications. There’s an open microphone for anyone interested in sharing their poetry—a move that aims to dismantle traditional contest logic and the dynamics of competition. Instead of roses, Sierra gives out brass sculptures of the chamomile flower, associated with patience, simplicity, and humility. The artist will also act as master of ceremonies, offering speeches and presenting awards in an institutional contest style to highlight the tensions and contradictions within sponsorships, representation, and poetic production. 

Artist who researches how natural and manufactured spaces are constructed, transformed, thought of and perceived. She uses materials as the marrow of the content and for constructing her installations and walk-through structures, using contrasts or dichotomies that seek to rarify their familiarity. In many instances her work generates a threshold or a limit between different elements that can be dissimilar or even irreconcilable. The resulting choices skew to forming habitats, perception- and movement- exercises and even new protozoan lives. Starting in the 1990s, Táboas was a founding member at Mexico City’s Temístocles 44 alternative space. Standout solo exhibitions include dia cronía at Casa Ortega in Mexico City, 2023; Gama térmica at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, in 2022, and also at Mexico City’s Museo JUMEX from 2021 to 2022; Piedra principio at the Fundación RAC in Pontevedra, 2021; Clave intermedia at Galería Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2019; Azul sólido, mounted at the Fundación CAB in Burgos; Superficies límite at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in 2011 plus 2002’s Silvestre at the same city’s Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros.

Nado de fondo, 2024
Venetian mosaic tiles, cement, stone, and steel

For more than two decades, Sofía Táboas has considered displacement in sculpture using objects that burst into space and generate a sense of estrangement—seemingly out of place. These explorations are linked to Táboas’ interest in Venetian mosaic titles, a material that implies the presence of water. In Nado de fondo, a public piece that recreates a cross-section of a swimming pool, the artist takes up the ideas central to her work in a sculpture that invites interaction and causes people to change their course to circumvent it. This piece considers how changing course can generate a new point of view of one’s landscape. 

Artist and cultural promotor who works in collage, installation and performance, centered on the lived context in León. He also writes about studies that have been produced regarding urban “barrio” attire as well as that worn by rural communities in the Mexican states of Tlaxcala, Puebla and Guanajuato. The artist received a BA in culture and art at the Universidad de Guanajuato. He has collaborated with the Nawi Xochitelpoch collective, at San Miguel Canoa in Puebla, where members study Nahuatl traditions as well as the town’s famed carnival celebrations. He has exhibited work in England, Greece, Mexico and the United States. Standout solo shows include El Cuarto de Aztlán, at the Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato, 2023; Gramolapirata at ArtSpace in Mexico City, 2023 and La Máscara de la Maringuía at the Instituto Cultural de León’s Galería Jesús Gallardo, 2021. His roster of collective shows includes participation at Rostro, staged at Charlie James in Los Angeles in 2022, and in the same year he was awarded the Activisme Creative prize by the Cultures of Resistance Foundation. 

Que no estoy aquí (Enclaustramiento puritano), 2024
Set of photographs on fabric, blessed and bonded velvet inlaid with various materials

Mandorla Guadalupana (¿Utopía de la dignidad?), 2024
Set of photographs on fabric bonded assembly in religious-style fabric inlaid with various materials
In collaboration with Grecia Edith Murillo

Guadalupanxs, 2020-23
Collage selection

12 de enero, 2024
Video (color, sound)
59 sec.

Wayayay, 2021
Video (color, sound)
1 min. 13 sec.

Tuxamee’s practice takes a special interest in textile and collage, addressing identity issues using the intersections between religious iconography, dissidence, and popular culture. The pieces in the room focus on the popular dimension of religion, both in domestic and public spheres. At the center are photographic sets that question modes of representation at Leon’s January 12th festival, known as “Indians’ Day.” Since 1876, the custom has been to visit the sanctuary of the Virgin of Guadalupe and for people—often children—to take photos of themselves as “Juan Dieguito” or “Lupita” against backdrops placed along the route. The photographs comprising one of the sets’ mantles were recovered from family archives. The walls of the show exhibit a series of collages reminiscent of the altars usually found in homes. 

In work by Salvador Xharicata here is constant negotiation between the past, present and future, a strategy that questions his uprooting and ethnic-integration experiences. Themes like the history of the mestizaje race project, ethnic reinvention in Indigenous peoples in the first movements’ political processes, oral tradition in the P’uréchepa language, memory and maternal language as political potential all traverse his works’ reflections. In 2019, he joined the Taller de Escritura Etnográfica at the Escuela Nacional de Estudios Superiores, in Morelia, and is also a member of the Inconclusx study group, a contemporary art research program at Aparato de Arte in Guanajuato. Conocer el mundo con la boca sin que te piquen las espinas, at the Museo Casa Diego Rivera in Guanajuato, in 2023; Verano del Amor at Galería Campeche in Mexico City, 2023; Caminamos sobre la misma pira at Espacio Cabeza in Guadalajara, 2023 and Arte de los pueblos de México. Disrupciones Indígenas in 2022 at Mexico City’s Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes figured among the artist’s most notable recent collective exhibitions. He was a Programa de Estímulo a la Creación y Desarrollo Artístico grant recipient in 2023 and won the acquisition prize at the XLI Encuentro Nacional de Arte Joven in 2021.

Re-fugio – Re- incorporar – Refugio, 2023
Video (color, sound)
7 min. 05 seconds.

La lengua que trenza, 2023
Video (color, sound)
7 min. 51 seg

Hacer trenzas corporales, 2023
Video (color, sound)
11 min. 51 seg.

Nínt’ani. Volver a casa, 2024
Pinewood, acrylic paint, and quadraphonic sound
Video recording and editing: Julio César Galeote Pineda and Óscar Galeote Pineda
Carpenter: Michael Gembe

Nínt’ani. Volver a casa is an installation representing a “troje,” the traditional wooden housing of the people of the P’urhépecha plateau. The structure is accompanied by benches and chairs bearing transcriptions of text from a 19th-century document by the second Marquis of Rayas showing the shifts of indigenous people working in Guanajuato’s mines. The work also includes earlier audiovisual pieces that record the act of braiding hair; some feature the artist’s grandmother and mother. To a certain extent, Salvador Xharicata’s work addresses corporeality—that is, how we inhabit identity in our bodies. Language is a space in which the body and identity are closely intertwined; language is something to be inhabited. Originally from a P’urhépecha community, but belonging to a generation that no longer speaks the indigenous language, Xharicata reflects on how identity and language are related to the spaces that bodies inhabit. Xharicata links this notion to the history of enslaved P’urhépecha people exploited in mines in this exhibition, which is installed in a museum that was once the family home of the Marquises of San Juan de Rayas. 

Artist whose work is nourished from the consequences that arise from historic as well as personal imaginary and fictions that affect bodies, in relation to the body that painting and its material compositions inhabit. The artist studied visual arts at “La Esmeralda,” Mexico’s national painting, sculpture and engraving school, and holds an MFA in visual arts from the arts and design school at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In addition to shows in Mexico, her work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States. Recent solo shows have included El fuego que no produce, at Guadalajara’s Museo Cabañas, 2023 to 2024; Un lugar para sí misma, at the Galería Karen Huber in Mexico City, 2021; Sudor frío at Proxyco Gallery, New York, 2011; To cool the blue, at Taka Ishii Film & Photography in Tokyo, from 2020. Perhaps the truth at Ballroom in Marfa, Texas, 2023; Murales para un cubo blanco, at Mexico City’s Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, 2020; Princesses des villes at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, 2019 and Tú de mí, yo de ti at the Museo de la Ciudad de México, in 2019, figured among the artist’s most notable recent collective exhibitions. She is a three-time recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores grant from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, was awarded an Apexart Fellowship in 2019 and won the Premio Nacional de Arte Joven in 2013. She is a professor at the Universidad de Monterrey.

Nitsoats, 2024
Acrylic and charcoal on linen

Mitote, 2024
Acrylic, oil, graphite, and charcoal on cotton and jute

Como una fruta madura, 2024
Acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen

Dificultad del aire, 2024
Acrylic and charcoal on linen and cotton

Naranja, violeta y amarillo, 2024
Acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen

Ver arder, 2024
Acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen

Orgulloso de su pesada carga, 2024
High-temperature ceramic

Espacio tomado, 2024
High-temperature ceramic

Una siendo dos y dos una, 2024
High-temperature ceramic

Pequeño monumento, 2024
High-temperature ceramic

Huesecillos blancos esparcidos en la noche, 2024
High-temperature ceramic

Sustratos, 2024
High-temperature ceramic

La piel de la noche, a series of paintings and ceramics, combines different notions of corporality and materiality with the recurring nocturnal imaginary in the artist’s work and references from history, literature, and philosophy. More than surfaces, the paintings are conceived as bodies with apparent seams and structures. Transparent fabrics (without primer) allow the viewer to consider the painting not only from the front but all sides. The works are inhabited by bodies that move, dance, and overlap; bodies infringed upon by violence and conservative practices yet meeting for a festive ritual: a type of genderless, ageless eroticism.

Vidales used materials like fluids, runoff, and minerals and processes like accumulation, assemblage, and burning. The large-format pictorial bodies, which feature irregular shapes, propose a spatial and scale relationship to the viewer’s body. The high-temperature ceramics, conceived as “three-dimensional paintings,” refer to pieces, like incense burners and other vessels, used in rituals as well as atavistic practices. The struggle between light and darkness is presented as a representation of change, not moral perspectivism. 

Visual artist and filmmaker whose work emerges from long-term field research in multi-layered territories. She seeks to explore the effect certain natural and climatic phenomena produce in the lives of those who live there. She trained at the “La Esmeralda” national school of painting, sculpture and engraving and studied cinema with director Víctor Gaviria, among others. Recent solo shows in Mexico include Río de Niebla, Río de Adobe, Río de Sangre, at Mexico City’s Ex Teresa Arte Actual, from 2023 to 2024; and Antes del Presente at the same city’s Casa del Lago arts space in 2018. Her work has been featured at collective exhibitions such as La Oficina del Agua at the 2021 itinerant Bienal Sur Argentina iteration; Normal Exceptions at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2021; Parasitage, Ruidos Negros at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 2021; Years of Solitude at the II Biennale d’Architecture d’Orleans, 2019; among others. Tania Ximena has received grants from the Fundación Jumex, the Programa de Fomento al Cine Mexicano, the Programa BBVA-MACG alongside three Jóvenes Creadores grants from Mexico’s Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in 2007, 2010 and 2016. Among other recognitions, her first feature film, POBO TZU-Noche Blanca, from 2021, received a Kaleidoscope award from DOC NYC as well as the Zánate film festival grand prize. She belongs to Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte.  

La marcha del líquen, 2024
Two-channel video installation (color, sound)
Tabasco 14 min. 57 sec. / Antarctica 14 min. 46 seconds.

Production: Tania Ximena
Editing: Rogelio Díaz
Photography: Antarctica, Tania Ximena; Tabasco, Linda López H. Maldonado
Music: Carlos Edelmiro
Sound design: Joel Arguelles
Direct sound: Antarctica, Tania Ximena; Tabasco, Amanda Grana
Color: Omar Lara
Tabasco text: In collaboration with Esmeralda López Sánchez
Local production Tabasco: Sister María Ester Hernández, Sister Ana Mayo, and Vania Quevedo

The two videos that make up this installation contrast the ecosystems of Antarctica and Tabasco, which, due to the climate crisis, are undergoing transformative chain reactions. In the first video, filmed on King George Island, the greening of Antarctica due to melting ice gives rise to lichen and the white landscape of the pole recedes. The second film focuses on El Bosque, a Tabasco town consumed by the sea in just a few years due to increasing water levels. In the latter, a narration in the Yokot’an language (based on the testimony of Guadalupe Cobos, spokesperson for the El Bosque community) accompanies the viewer on a tour through the Centla swamps with an infrared camera that modifies certain colors, generating an estranged landscape. The artist’s methodology relies on long-term conversation and collaboration with various entities. Such was the case when filming in Antarctica, which involved arduously arranging for international cooperation.

The Programa Antártico Colombiano–PAC (Colombian Antarctic Program), the Comisión Colombiana de los Océanos–CCO (Colombian Commission of the Oceans), Instituto Antártico Uruguayo–IAU (Uruguayan Antarctic Institute), Artigas Base on King George Island, Proyecto Colombiano Arte en la Antártida–PCAA (Colombian Art Project in Antarctica), stimulus from the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales–SACPC (Support System for Creative and Cultural Projects), Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (The Jumex Contemporary Art Foundation), Sony México, Phonolab, and the 15th FEMSA Biennial

* Beneficiary of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Art (National Art Creators System) 2023-26, part of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (Support System for Creative and Cultural Projects).