OTRXS MUNDXS, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City 09/2020 – 02/2021
OTRXS MUNDXS is a group exhibition that surveys and articulates the work of an heterogeneous, multicultural group of more than forty artists who work individually and collectively in Mexico City. Throughout four thematic sections (I. Capitalism and Domination, II. Seriality, Identity and Obliteration, III. Entropy, Speculation and Visualization, and IV. Body and Materiality), the exhibition presents recent works and special commissions, which reveal urgent discourses, representative of an artistic community who internalizes the paradigms and failures of late capitalism.
OTRXS MUNDXS focuses on highlighting otherness: artist’s presentations constitute artistic microcosms which question the preconceived, hegemonic notions—or else, they solidify alternative visions—of what it means to make art in or from Mexico City. OTRXS MUNDXS presents a majority of younger, or emerging artists—for some of whom this exhibition is their first major museum presentation—as it articulates the narratives in which they are invested with a selected group of more established artists who have been instrumental for defining the Mexican artistic landscape, both nationally and internationally.
Even though the exhibition is an exhaustive revision of the current artistic landscape, it is not intended to be an all-encompassing or universal exercise. In that sense, the exhibition has been constructed with an awareness of its own limitations and with the hope of posing one argument, amongst the many that can be made about art in the present. The exhibition is, first and foremost, a platform for art and artists to trace conversations that have been at the forefront of global artistic discourse, presenting the important dialogue between local communities and Mexican artists with artists from Ecuador, República Dominicana, France, Brazil, Peru, and many cities of the United States. It also addresses the lack of institutional representation and attention to local communities, particularly for a younger generation of artists in the city. OTRXS MUNDXS consists of an unprecedented institutional response to the global pandemic; a gesture which, in the best of cases, anticipates a post-pandemic alterity, a world in which equality, social and interspecies justice and the well-being of the inhabitants of this complex city, is not posed as radical idea, but as an attainable reality.
Capitalism and Domination presents a large, site-specific installation comprised of recent works by Pia Camil, who thinks about the complexity of capitalist, transnational relations, contrasted with a recent series of paintings, her most personal, intimate body of work to date. Together, they create a sort of opening act for the exhibition which considers the broader, global forces that are constantly oppressing more intimate, domestic environments. Yeni Mao presents a series of masterfully constructed sculptures by which the artist introduces a vocabulary of materials, one where formal contrasts represent his own research on craft in relationship to desire. Other works by artists SANGREE and Miguel Calderón, deepen the conversation about the physical and subliminal consequences of branding and mark-making.
Yeni Mao (Guelph, Canadá, 1971) suele incluir en su obra elementos de su propia biografía –una historia marcada por la deriva transnacional de su familia, y por su identidad de hombre queer de descendencia china–. Al hablar de la subjetividad del cuerpo explorando los límites del deseo, de la dominación y la ausencia, sus esculturas establecen, también, un diálogo con los sistemas vernáculos de construcción.
Sus piezas recientes articulan materiales de naturaleza y carácter diverso creando un vocabulario en el que participan el tacto suave de la piel, el aspecto inofensivo del azulejo, la porosidad de la cerámica o la dureza del metal.
