Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico
Museo Jumex, Mexico City
March 27 - August 15, 2021
Museo Jumex presents Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico, a thematic survey of contemporary art in Mexico over the past 20 years. Drawing primarily from the Colección Jumex with additional works by invited artists and collaborators, the exhibition fills the entire museum with more than 60 works by artists based in Mexico, including those of international origin, and Mexican artists living and working abroad. The museum’s galleries are stripped down to their original design for the exhibition, allowing for the installation of large-scale, conceptual works and ample natural light throughout the galleries.
Curated by the museum’s curatorial team led by Chief Curator, Kit Hammonds, the exhibition’s title is inspired by a key term in micro-history–the study of history from the perspective of individuals and their encounters with authority, and proposes the idea of looking from a grassroots perspective upwards, rather than from the top down.
“For Normal Exceptions, we looked at the entire Colección Jumex as a starting point, to highlight the development of art in Mexico over the last two decades,” noted Kit Hammonds. “We also want to show these works in the larger context of Mexico’s multi-dimensional ecosystem of artistic practice, and to include collaborators as a way of creating conversations between the museum and its contemporaries.” Museo Jumex’s second and third floors feature a variety of works from the collection, many of which are shown for the first time in the museum, joined by a selection of works by invited artists.
Exhibited for the first time in the Americas, Stefan Brüggemann’s (Mexican, b. 1975) Conceptual Decoration Silver and Black Wallpaper (2008) spans approximately 100 meters of a second-floor gallery wall. Despite its large scale, the two-word text “conceptual decoration” running across its surface appears small, presenting a series of contrasts and ironies between the ideas of concept versus decoration, art and design, work and support, and language and architecture. The ambiguity this provokes is a theme explored throughout the exhibition.
On view for the first time since its acquisition in 2010, Jorge Méndez Blake’s (Mexican, b. 1974) El castillo [The Castle] (2007) is a 14-meter-long brick wall that runs over a single copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, distorting and disrupting the orderly rows of 3,000 bricks from which the work is constructed. The work touches on some of the key motifs explored in the exhibition, particularly the relationship of the individual to authority, as explored in Kafka’s novel and represented poetically by the artist in the interruption it makes to the structure above.
Chantal Peñalosa (Mexican, b. 1987) has been constructing an archive of art from projects realized by the iniciative inSite in public spaces in her native city of Tijuana. Having never seen the projects herself, her study and knowledge of them has played a formative role in her own practice. Creating clay models from her imagination and photographing the now empty locations where they were originally presented, Chantal Peñalosa aims to connect to these practices and to the places they temporarily transformed. This is the first presentation of the project in a museum after its showing in the artist’s independent space in Tijuana.
Throughout the run of the exhibition, the first-floor gallery features three different installations presented sequentially and curated in collaboration with an organization that has played a significant role in the formation of contemporary art in Mexico.
The first is co-organized with ZsONAMACO, Latin America’s largest art fair and a chief driver in bringing Mexican artists to the international art market. In collaboration with ZsONAMACO’s Artistic Director, Juan Canela, the installation centers on new work by the Mexico City-based duo Rometti Costales that delves into the intersection of modern and ancient histories, beliefs, and practices.
inSite—which began as a cross-border public arts program in San Diego and Tijuana, and more recently ran Casa Gallina in Mexico City, which engaged artists with various communities—collaborates with Museo Jumex on the second installation. In the last two years, under the curatorial direction of Andrea Torreblanca, inSite has been reflecting on its own artist legacy and its future through a themed journal putting forward critical and highly current issues impacting art and the public, inSite’s journal and archives become the basis for an installation in the first-floor gallery as well as a live performance that takes its archives as a script.
The third collaborative installation is with the independent art school SOMA, founded by artist Yoshua Okón in 2009, which has played a significant role in forging links between artists of different generations and in the development of a discourse that has become central to many emerging artists, through both their studio program and public events.
Normal Exceptions continues Museo Jumex’s year-long series of exhibitions highlighting works from the renowned Colección Jumex, one of the leading collections of Mexican art, and one of the most significant private collections of contemporary art in Latin America. Other artists in the exhibition include Iñaki Bonillas, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Miguel Calderón y Yoshua Okón, Pia Camil, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Zhivago Duncan, Mario García Torres, Daniel Guzmán, Gabriel Kuri, Teresa Margolles, Damián Ontiveros Ramírez, Gabriel Orozco, Raúl Ortega Ayala, G. T. Pellizzi, Alejandra de la Puente, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, Lake Verea and the collective Tercerunquinto.
Museo Jumex will continue to offer a suite of online programming titled “Museo en casa,” to ensure its content is made widely and easily accessible. “Museo en casa” includes free online courses with critical thinkers in Mexico, and additional content by video, images, and text. Additional details about accompanying online programming for Normal Exceptions will be posted regularly on the museum’s website.
MUSEO JUMEX
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada, 11520, Mexico City
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