Zona Maco 2024 - 20th edition, Mexico City - Centro Citibanamex

ZONA MACO 2024 - 20th edition

Centro Citibanamex, Mexico City 

February 7 – 11, 2024

ZⓈONAMACO celebrates its 20th edition. In addition to presenting an extensive program of parallel activities and its renowned program of conversations with international panelists, ZⓈONAMACO  hosts a special edition that brings together exhibitors, gallerists, curators, artists and art professionals from different parts of the world in its four fairs: ZⓈONAMACO MÉXICO ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO, ZⓈONAMACO DISEÑO, ZⓈONAMACO SALÓN DEL ANTICUARIO and ZⓈONAMACO FOTO.

ZⓈONAMACO MÉXICO ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO

Featuring a broad range of proposals, from young and mid-career projects to contemporary works by global artists, as well as historical pieces of Modern Art. It brings together exhibitors of international scope in four specialized sections:

MAIN SECTION

The largest section of the fair presents leading international galleries with the top quality pieces in painting, graphics, sculpture, installation, video and new media, from the most representative contemporary artists of the global scene.

Selection Committee: 

Ben Loveless (Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin/Stockholm/Mexico City)

Karen Huber (Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City) 

Guilherme Simões de Assis (Simões de Assis, São Paulo/Curitiba)

Lauren Kelly (Sean Kelly Gallery, New York/Los Ángeles)

Teófilo Cohen (PROYECTOS MONCLOVA, Mexico City)

ZⓈONAMACO SUR

ZⓈONAMACO SUR, curated for the third time by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, explores artists' practices, projects, and galleries from the Global South or those engaged with the region, beyond mere origin. This year, following the thematic distinction of past editions, the ideas of generosity and care are at central in ZⓈONAMACO SUR, expressed through actions, words, and emotions, playing a vital role in human relationships, healthcare, and so many other domains. Art intersects with care by inspiring understanding, promoting well-being, and raising awareness of the other. It serves as a medium to explore various forms of carefulness - environmental, emotional, health, personal, and animal, are some. Ultimately, care encompasses a range of practices fostering healthy relationships, personal growth, and a compassionate society. Art can be a powerful medium through which care for oneself, others, and the world can be expressed and cultivated, and this is where Zsonamaco Sur 2024 lays its curatorial framework.

Curator: Luiza Teixeira de Freitas (Rio de Janeiro, 1984), is an independent curator. In addition to working on various projects in São Paulo, New York, London, Los Angeles and the Middle East, Luiza's practice focuses mainly on curating and consulting for private collections. She is founder of the independent publishing project Taffimai.

ZⓈONAMACO MODERN ART

This section showcases historical pieces by international artists with a panorama of genres and emblematic works produced mainly during the first half of the 20th century. 

Curator: Esteban King Álvarez (Mexico City, 1986) is a researcher and curator of modern and contemporary art. He holds a BA in History and a Master's degree in Art History from UNAM. From 2012 to 2015 he served as Curator and Head of Research at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, and from 2015 to 2019 as Curator of the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (ESPAC).

ZⓈONAMACO EJES

ZⓈONAMACO EJES 2024 foregrounds artists whose practices explore the powerful relationship between pleasure and politics. This section welcomes proposals from younger galleries, hybrid spaces, and artist-run initiatives featuring presentations that span from one to three artists. EJES exhibits the multiple and fascinating ways through which artists highlight the importance of care, love, leisure, intimacy, sexuality, and playfulness for inspiring new collective forms of living that can guarantee pleasure for all. Works related to the ideas of sexual dissidence, gender disobedience, erotic awakening, pleasure activism, queer utopias, and radical political imagination set the tone for this vibrant section. 

Curator: Bernardo Mosqueira (Rio de Janeiro, 1988) is a curator, writer, and researcher based in New York City. He is the founder and artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis, in Rio de Janeiro (since 2015); the ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum, New York (since 2021); and the director of Premio FOCO ArtRio (since 2012). He was part of the curatorial team of Galeria de Arte IBEU (2011-2015) and organized the performance festival Venus Terra (2011-2014). Mosqueira holds a masters in curatorial studies (CCS Bard, 2021).

ZⓈONAMACO DISEÑO

Curated by Cecilia León de la Barra, this fair features furniture, jewelry, textiles, every-day and decorative objects, as well as limited editions and historical pieces.

Director: Cecilia León de la Barra (Mexico City, 1975), independent curator.

EMERGENTE

Section that seeks to promote the work of young designers.

Curators: Cecilia León de la Barra, artistic director of ZⓢONAMACO Diseño, Joel Escalona (Mexico City, 1986), creative director and furniture designer, Jorge Diego Etienne (Tampico, 1983), industrial designer, creative director and consultant.

ZⓈONAMACO FOTO

This fair is conceived as an encounter with the photographic medium, exploring the possibilities offered by new tools and significant historical landmarks in the field. ZⓈONAMACO FOTO serves as a platform where the documentary genre, collective artistic creation, interdisciplinary collaborations, and discursive exercises converge, reflecting the evolving narratives of human thought and the surrounding reality.

Curator: Luis Graham Castillo (República Dominicana, 1982)  curator, cultural manager and researcher graduated from the Curando Caribe curatorial studies program. He has been part of curatorial teams and managed projects in various institutions and independent initiatives in the region, such as Casa Quién, the Red de Centros Culturales de España, Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes, MECA Art Fair, ArteBA, Museo de Arte Moderno, Photo-Imagen RD, Catalysta, EdgeZones, among others. He is currently Curator at the Dominican Public Art Program, attached to the Presidential Innovation Cabinet. He lives in Santo Domingo, where he collaborates for different media and is a faculty member of the Altos de Chavón School of Design.

ZⓈONAMACO SALÓN DEL ANTICUARIO

A space created for the exhibition, dissemination and sale of the exclusive symbolic universe of so-called antiques, in dialogue with visual arts, decorative and design goods produced before 1960. Art beyond the Academic realm that coexist in harmony by contrast, and is inserted and re-signified in the hyper-contemporaneity.

Curator: Alfonso Miranda Márquez (Mexico City, 1978) has a degree in history and a master's degree in art, specializing in image decoding. In 2003 he joined the Carlos Slim Foundation as academic curator. He's president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and member of the Advisory Board of the Carlos Slim Foundation's Center for the Study of Mexican History, as well as the FotObservatorio. Currently, Alfonso is Director of Museo Soumaya Plaza Loreto, Plaza Carso and Casa Guillermo Tovar de Teresa and co-editor of the digital magazine La Domadora.

ZⓈONAMACO LIBROS

ZⓈONAMACO Libros presents a selection of publishers specializing in art and photography.

ZⓈONAMACO

zsonamaco.com

Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico, Museo Jumex, Mexico City

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

fundacionjumex.org

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Miguel Calderon @ kurimanzutto, Mexico City - Pleasure Afterwards

Miguel Calderón: Pleasure Afterwards
kurimanzutto, Mexico City
Through July 27, 2019

MIGUEL CALDERON

Untitled, 2017 

Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York

kurimanzutto presents Pleasure Afterwards, a new solo exhibition by Miguel Calderón in which the artist brings together sculpture and video works that are interrelated and delve into events of his life. Calderón also includes a series of watercolors made in parallel to the main works in the show, which dive into his unconscious to produce alarmingly unsettling imagery. 

Miguel Calderon’s exhibition takes its title from the most recent video he directed in Mexico City, Pleasure Afterwards, which lies somewhere between documentary and fiction. Several of the pieces are connected to the artist’s search to integrate his personal experiences into his work by wandering through the city as he incorporates known and fictional characters, as well as objects that have marked his memory. 

Just after the earthquake of September 19, 2017 that struck Mexico City, Miguel Calderón established a close relationship with the maintenance staff of the Cibeles Fountain, an encounter that inspired part of this project. The video narrates a series of events told by a real character who also reenacts them. Presented along with the video work are a series of objects directly linked to the content of the film.  Amulets for an Earthquake, uses extreme irony in its depiction of the practical solution adopted by the staff in charge of the fountain in order to feel safe in a city that had just suffered an earthquake of tragic proportions.

A series of photographs also shown in the exhibition space were originated from the video Plenty of Nothingness. In it the artist presents a more abstract vision of disaster by means of a journey along an infinite sinkhole made from video clippings of news archives. Through these photographs, Miguel Calderón shows his fascination for the aesthetics of disaster and the absurd forms reality can take in a country prone to daily catastrophes.

A series of watercolors with a more expressive tone, and which seem to occupy a different mental space, are presented in orbit around these works. These watercolors depict figures of the artist's unconscious, visions of the external world that he assimilates and reconsiders in meditative exercises that disconnect him from the research undertaken for the other works. His vision of society and the expression of his experiences combine together in images that go from the ridiculous to the macabre, and through this process reveal emotional sincerity in the carefree style that has become characteristic of the artist.

ABOUT MIGUEL CALDERON

Miguel Calderón received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. He has been the recipient of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grant & Commissions program (2013), The MacArthur Fellowship for Film and New Media (2000), and the Bancomer/Rockefeller Fellowship (1995).

His most important solo exhibitions include: Miguel Calderón: Independientemente de con quien duerma, Fototeca Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires (2017); Color Bleed, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, New York (2012); Miguel Calderón, solo project, Casa América, Madrid, Spain (2010); Conversations with a Tropical Vulture, with George Kuchar, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); Bestseller, Panorámica, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2009); Ridiculum Vitae, La Panadería, Mexico City, Mexico (1998). Additionally, he has participated in group shows at the following institutions: Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2014); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California (2014); The Foundation Cartier, Paris, France (2013); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2011); The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California (2011); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2010); Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK), Vienna, Austria (2009); National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, United States (2007), PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, United States (2002), among others.

Miguel Calderón has participated in various biennials, including: 7th Internationale Photo-Triennial, Esslingen, Germany (2007); Bussan Biennale, Bussan, Korea (2006); Sharja Biennial 7, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2005), Yokohama Triennale of Contemporary Art, Yokohama, Japan (2005); ARCO, Madrid, Spain (1998).

Miguel Calderón currently lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico.

kurimanzutto
Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94
Col. San Miguel Chapultepec
11850 Mexico City
www.kurimanzutto.com