Mexican Pavilion, Mexico at 59th Venice Biennale of Art

The Mexican Pavilion, Mexico at the Venice Biennale 2022: the artists of the pavilion, the works, the times, the periods, the cost of the tickets and the exhibition venue.

The 59th Biennale Arte will open to the public on 23 April. But on the 20th, 21st and 22nd there will be the various openings and collateral events that always suddenly animate the Venetian artistic life. The awards ceremony will take place on the day of the opening to the public.

The title of the 59th edition of the Biennale d'Arte is Il Latte dei Sogni that means The Milk of Dreams.

The invited artists are 213 from 58 countries. There are 26 Italian artists, 180 the first participations in the International Exhibition, 1433 the works and objects on display, 80 new productions.

In all, 80 nations will participate in the Venice Biennale in the pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenale and in the historic center of Venice.

Go to the page of the 59th Venice Art Biennale

Mexican Pavilion, Mexico at 59th Biennale Arte of Venice

Press Release of Mexican Pavilion

The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), which is part of the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, announces the project that will represent our country in the 59th Venice International Art Biennale. The exhibition entitled Until the Songs Spring, will take place at the Mexican Pavilion, from April 23 to November 27, 2022.

Under the curatorship of Catalina Lozano and Mauricio Marcin, this proposal offers a collective approach, from a decolonial perspective, reflecting on worldviews, technologies, territories, and the reconfiguration of gender subjectivities. The artists Mariana Castillo Deball, Naomi Rinc�n Gallardo, Fernando Palma Rodr�guez and Santiago Borja Charles, offer allegories to imagine a coexistence based on complex relationships of reciprocity and respect. To construct a paradigm that addresses the mystery of regenerative coexistence of the most heterogeneous cultures, and not that of the exclusion of other living beings, both human and non-human.

Until the Songs Spring proposes to look at the ways that artists of different generations approach forms of knowledge that have not been colonized by the modern episteme, existing in resistance, and actualizing themselves to affirm opposite and alternate ways of life to the anthropocentric vision modeled by the univocal and unambiguous principle of progress. Under the decolonial perspective shared by the four artists in the project, their research offers a diverse vision of the thematic practices and conceptual matrices that characterize the contemporary art scene in Mexico today.

The invited jury that selected this curatorial proposal was comprised of: Carmen Cuenca, executive director of INSITE; Amanda de la Garza, general director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art and the Visual Arts Department, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico; Pablo Le�n de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America at the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Patricia Sloane, independent curator and member of the Patronato de Arte Contempor�neo, AC; and Dr. Lucina Jim�nez, general director of INBAL.

For this edition, the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature decided to modify the participation guidelines, based on criteria that would allow moving from an individual proposal, towards a sense of dialogue and greater collectivity, promoting intergenerational dialogue, with gender perspective, and to consider an interdisciplinary approach, in order to make visible the diversity of the Mexican artistic ecosystem, taking into consideration the viability and significance of the projects in relation to the current context. The jury highlighted that for the selection of the joint proposal by Lozano and Marcin, Until the Songs Spring, raises current and timely problems not only in a global context, but also in the local one; juxtaposes and, in turn, promotes dialogue between cultures around necessary and urgent issues to be addressed in their own complexity. INBAL maintains its commitment so that Mexican audiences know the proposal that will be presented in Venice, for which it will launch a public program on digital platforms to offer a context of the reflections raised through the work of the artists that are present in our national pavilion. After its exhibition in Venice, the show will begin a tour in different venues in the country.

Curators:

Catalina Lozano (Bogot�, 1979) is an independent curator and researcher based in Mexico City. For the past 10 years, she has been interested in minor narratives that question hegemonic forms of knowledge. The analyses of colonial narratives as well as the deconstruction of the modern division between nature and culture have acted as departure points for many of her recent and future curatorial and editorial projects including the exhibitions A Natural History of Ruins (Piv�, S�o Paulo, 2021), The willow sees the heron�s image upside down (TEA, Tenerife, 2020), Le jour des esprits et notre nuit (CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, 2019, co-curated with Elfi Turpin), Winning by Losing (CentroCentro, Madrid, 2019), Ce qui ne sert pas s�oublie (CAPC, Bordeaux, 2015), A Machine Desires Instruction as a Garden Desires Discipline (MARCO Vigo, FRAC Lorraine, and Alh�ndiga Bilbao, 2013-14), and the book Crawling Doubles: Colonial Collecting and Affects (B42, Par�s), co-edited with Mathieu K. Abonnenc and Lotte Arndt. In 2018 her book The Cure was published by A.C.A. Public. She curated the exhibition Amarantus by Mariana Castillo Deball at MUAC (Mexico City, 2021) and ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2021).

Between 2017 and 2019 she was Associate Curator at Museo Jumex in Mexico City where she developed exhibition projects with B�rbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Fernanda Gomes, Xavier Le Roy, and Mathieu K. Abonnenc among other artists, and organized the exhibition Could Be (An Arrow). A Reading of La Colecci�n Jumex. She was part of the artistic team of the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014 and between 2008 and 2010 she was responsible for Gasworks Residency Programme in London.

Mauricio Marcin (Mexico, 1980)

He works as Chief Curator at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (MACG) since 2019. In 2015, he cofounded Aeromoto, a public library based in Mexico City (aeromoto.mx).
His curatorial research tries to make visible the neo-avant-garde and non-objectual practices developed in Mexican art during the second half of the 20th century. His work is based on archival practices and simultaneously, his historical research has been linked to the practices of young generations in diverse ways, that it offers a rhizomatic perspective of Mexican art in recent decades.
In 2021, he curated the retrospective exhibition of Juan Jos� Gurrola at MACG, which brings together six decades of work by the multifaceted Mexican creator.
In 2019 he curated Abusos de las formas at MACG. In 2018 he curated the exhibition Bombs: Marcos Kurtycz in Witte de With, Rotterdam and Common Silence in Baxter Street, New York. In 2017 he curated Activating Objects at Another Space, New York. Between 2012 and 2016 he was curator at Museo Experimental el Eco where he made exhibitions of Vivian Suter, Wolf Von Kries, Diego P�rez, among others.
In 2015, he published the book Las ideas de Gamboa for Museo Jumex. In 2013 he participated in the Mercosur Biennial. In 2011 he published the book Artecorreo. That same year he participated in the residence in Capacete, Brazil. He was curator of El Clauselito, a space dedicated to contemporary painting in the Museum of Mexico City. Together with Annabela Tournon, he edits the bilingual magazine Tada, in French and Spanish.

Artists:

Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico, 1975) is a visual artist who has focused on exploring the history of cultural objects, their prevalence and the different ways in which they have been understood and interpreted through time.
The multidisciplinary approach of her work has led her to collaborate with specialists from different branches of scientific and cultural knowledge. Her work has been honored with international awards, including the Prize of the National Gallery, Berlin (2013), the Zurich Art Prize (2012) and the Ars Viva Award (2009).

She has participated in several large-scale exhibitions and biennials, including the S�o Paulo Biennial (2016), the Berlin Biennial (2014), dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012) and the Venice Biennale (2011), among others. Her most recent solo exhibitions include the one held at the Museum f�r Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany (2021), Modern Art Oxford, England (2020), Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019) or at the New Museum, New York, United States (2019). Also at the San Francisco Art Institute, United States (2016), Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum f�r Gegenwart, Germany (2014), Glasgow Center for Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2013) and at the Chisenhale Gallery, England (2013). She has been a sculpture professor at the Academy of Art in M�nster, Germany, since 2015.

Naomi Rinc�n Gallardo (1979) is a visual artist who lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico. From a decolonial feminist and queer perspective, her audiovisual and performative work creates narratives of desire, dissidence and resilience in the face of contemporary processes of dispossession and heteropatriarchal violence in neo-colonial contexts.
Naomi Rinc�n Gallardo integrates into her mythical-political practice her interests in speculative fiction, music videos, theatrical games, vernacular celebrations, and the manual elaboration of props and costumes.
She completed her undergraduate studies at La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking. She obtained her master's degree from the Education: Culture Language and Identity program at Goldsmiths University of London and is a PhD from the Practice Program, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna . She is currently a member of the National System of Art Creators 2019-2022 of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Museo Experimental el Eco, Mexico (2019); Biennial Femsa (2018); SF Moma (2017); Biennial of Nicaragua (2016); Anticolonial Fantasies , Friday Exit, Vienna (2016), Odysea Ocotepec en Kuenste der Welt, K�ln (2014), among others.

Fernando Palma Rodr�guez (1959) has developed a body of work that is intended to provoke reflections on the excessive use of technologies in modern life, and the ways in which capitalism has destroyed the balance between nature and culture. His work seeks a regeneration of the relationships between species and the revaluation of the living traditional culture of Milpa Alta, especially the Nahuatl language that prevailed in his native place and that has been disappearing.
His work has a mechatronic and artisan nature: he creates machines that he himself develops, builds and programs. These artifacts are often activated by the viewer and react to their movements through light and motion detectors. He works actively in the Calpulli Tecalco Civil Association, created by his mother Carmen in 1998 with the aim of preserving the Nahuatl language and, through it, the milpatense worldview. Through this association, they have also defended traditional forms of farming and prevented the proliferation of transgenic corn that threatens the ecosystem diversity of the region.

Fernando Palma is a Technician in Industrial Mechanics from CETMA and an Industrial Engineer from UPIICSA of the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico City (1982). He received a BA in Art and Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London (1991) and did postgraduate studies at both the Slade School of Fine Arts in London and the Rijksakademie Van Bildendenkunsten in the Netherlands (1993).
Palma has exhibited his work at the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea (2020); at the Lyon Biennale, France (2020); at MoMA PS1, New York, United States, (2018); at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca (2017); FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France (2016); Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2015); the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, Colorado (2015); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014).

Santiago Borja Charles (Mexico 1970) interweaves relevant elements of diverse cultural heritages, that is, of different ways of conceiving the world, he achieves a series of juxtapositions that equally touch both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Thus, through what he calls �anachronistic montages�, he seeks to make evident the complexity with which our cultural values are articulated, and that in for the sake of the construction of concrete identities, most of the time they are reduced and simplified to a single, permanent and unequivocal thing. His most recent projects include Premier Contact (Beauvais), Totemic Sampler (Kortrijk, Belgium) and Everything Falls into place when it collapses (Arizona's SMOCA). He has made various interventions for a specific site such as A Mental Image (Sonneveld House, Rotterdam), Suprasensible (Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona), Site (Villa Savoya de Le Corbusier, Poissy, France), Fort Da / Sampler (Neutra- VDL House, Los Angeles); In the Shadow of the Sun (IMMA, Dublin); Divan (Freud Museum, London) among others. Among the main group exhibitions in which he has participated are the Hangzhou Triennial in China, the Orl�ans Architecture Biennale, the Architecture Biennale in Chicago, the triennial of art at the Orange County Museum of Art, The Natural Order of Things at the Fundaci�n Jumex, The Global Contemporary at the ZKM, Ouverture pour inventaire, at the FRAC Pays de la Loire, Ruta Mystica at MARCO de Monterrey and Poule! at the Jumex Foundation

Useful information for the visit

Hours: Gardens from 10.00 to 19.00. Arsenale from 10.00 to 19.00 (from 10.00 to 20.00 on Friday and Saturday until September 30th). Closed on Mondays (except May 13, September 2, November 18).
Tickets: please visit the official website.
Phone: +39.041.5218711; fax +39.041.5218704
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: Biennale of Venice