Genealogies and Dissidences
Galleries 4, 5, 6 & north terrace
MUAC Collection
For the past decade and a half, MUAC has built a collection of art produced since 1952 without intending that the artworks, documents and histories it contains would ever constitute a unified, geographic, linear or identitarian narrative. As is intrinsic to contemporary art collections, this sampling of the living, controversial culture of our times implies groupings and lineages as well as solitary, dissident adventures. It would betray this heterogeneity to present our collection as a simplified whole. Nevertheless, the growth and maturation of our archives suggests that it is no longer convenient to conceal their complexity behind general thematic presentations.
Genealogies and Dissidences represents a new phase in which the museum’s collections occupy a dedicated section of the building through the simultaneous exhibition of a variety of cores, which will be periodically renewed. These cores can be historical explorations, the presentation of a large-scale installation or essayistic groupings. We hope that this multiple, discontinuous presentation does justice to the way in which we increasingly appreciate art and culture, precisely because it allows us a multitude of bursts of matter and meaning.
The Festival of Bullets
Galleries 4 & 5
21.10.2023 - 24.03.2024
Violence is not only a physical, social and political act, but also a labyrinth of representations. There is no pure violence that does not also produce signifiers that include the creation of images and concepts regarding enemies, victims and allies, visions of the distribution of powers and terrors among varied subjects and collectivities and the ostentation of power objectified in instruments of death. These pieces describe relations of power, strength and the experience of the hangmen. Its title pays homage to a celebrated story from Martín Luis Guzmán’s chronicle of the Mexican Revolution, one which has unfortunately become a symbol for our times as well.
Darkroom
Gallery 6
21.10.2023 - 28.04.2024
The expression darkroom refers to a place for rapid, consensual erotic encounters that occur in the shadows so as to better encourage anonymity and disinhibition. This gallery brings together the work of contemporary artists who explore sexual experience without subjecting themselves to the narrow vision of public morality or who suggest exhibitionism as a transgressive or critical practice, although some of these representations continue to build on that male visual pleasure which understands eroticism as visual consumption. Likewise, a large part of these pieces celebrates and explore the varieties of homosexual experience at a time of challenges to the dominant vision of heteronormative sexuality. Finally, some pieces by contemporary artists use sex as an index of social relationships, beyond eroticism in itself.
An Archive of El Archivero
Gallery 4
21.10.2023 - 24.03.2024
In 1984, the artists Yani Pecanins, Gabriel Macotela and Armando Sáenz founded El Archivero, a space for exhibiting, disseminating and distributing artist’s books in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood. El Archivero persists in the memory as the most important agency and collective in the local development of a circuit for the production and distribution of artist’s books as a genre and project. Until its dissolution in 1993, El Archivero was a collaborative, experimental platform for creative dialogue and self-publication in Mexico through the production of small print runs with artisanal techniques and the creation of a national and international network for exchanging publications. This exhibition explores the group’s archive and offers a panorama of the artist’s book during one of the genre’s booms in our latitudes.
Along the Ground
North terrace
A key modality in contemporary sculpture and object art involves challenging the ancient convention that identifies sculpture with statuary and, therefore, with verticality. Whether for constructive or thematic reasons, many contemporary sculptures express spatial limit situations, both exploiting horizontality as well as intervening and transfiguring specific sites. We have placed a variety of pieces from the MUAC Collection throughout the museum building, in different spaces for movement and socialization, in a challenge to inherited conceptions of the artistic object.
