LA GUERRA DE LAS IMÁGENES

Group show of Mexican artists curated by Wendy Cabrera Rubio

09.05.23 - 30.05.23

The exhibition borrows its title from the book of the same name -Images at War- by Sergei Gruzinski, where the writer develops a meticulous historical argument about the formation of a complex mechanism of cultural appropriation that he names the baroque machine. This mechanism, in collaboration with forms of negotiation, allows to operate as a system of resistance to confront the "mestizaje". In Mexico, this concept means the union of mestizo and creole populations protected by the flag of the modern nation state, leaving aside any subject that dissociates of this whitewashed and racist logic promoted by the Mexican state with the purpose of making invisible the systemic violence, which persists since the period of the conquest up to the contemporary era.

The present artists are young, mostly urban dwellers who oppose these narratives by making visible the links between the oppression exercised by the colonial project and eventually by neoliberalism, appropriating their visual tools. Roxana Villegas, Mariana Ledezma and Katherine Gomez directly confront the institutions created during the 20th century in Mexico that are now in a severe crisis, such as the Mexican Social Security Institute and PEMEX, the Mexican state oil company. 

On the other hand, the artist Mayra Vineya with her project "Decir el hambre" (“Telling hunger”) investigates the history, conceptualisation and application of food policies in Mexico, alluding to "La gota de leche" the homonymous program that operated at the beginning of the 20th century on the independent initiative of a group of women that results in an optimistic and radical wink to the current necro state. Ileana Moreno, Carlos Martínez and Carlos Lara separate themselves from 20th century Mexican modernity through the use of advertising, deconstructing colonial codes and making evident the link between modernist appropriation and colonialism.

This exhibition aims to hack the systems of control and discipline through the modification of symbols in order to cause noise and activate the contamination of the hegemonic colonialist messages that prevail today.

Artists:

Leonardo Ascencio

Avantgardo

Erish

Andi García

Charlotte Glez

Katherine Gómez

Fernando Gress Muñoz

Carlos Lara

Mariana Ledesma

Fabiana Mapel

Carlos Martínez

Ileana Moreno

Luis Fernando Muñoz

Maria Jose Ordóñez

Orlando Ortiz

Antonio Ponce

Roxana G. Villegas

Mayra Vineya

Marek Wolfryd