Featuring the visionary works of six Latin American artists. Spanning several generations, the exhibition features artists who explore the interwoven associations of body, land and identity in the history and present of Latin America: Minia Biabiany (b. 1988, Guadeloupe), Vivian Caccuri (b. 1986, Brazil), Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico), Ana Mendieta (b. 1948, Cuba—d. 1985, USA), Nohemí Pérez (b. 1962, Colombia), and Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Argentina).
Artists in the region have addressed the concepts of body and territory as sites of resistance and creativity, especially in response to an ongoing colonial history. Through the works on display, the exhibition represents the artists’ diverse responses to the equally varied local conditions, be they environmental, social, or cultural. The distinct practices are united by the use of poetic strategies to speak to power.
The transformed galleries will be presented as a sensorial landscape, with paintings, photos, video, installations, and performance art that explore the ways bodies exist and inhabit territories in the context of political, historical, and physical dimensions. The works speak to particularities of Latin America, from the archaeological site of Yagul in Mexico and the Amazonian forests to the town of Panajachel in Guatemala and the archipelago of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. The display includes loaned works with pieces produced specifically for the exhibition.
“Silhouettes in the Undergrowth” is curated by Kit Hammonds, Museo Jumex Curator in Chief, and Marielsa Castro Vizcarra, Associate Curator.
“As part of the Museo Jumex’s program that engages with Latin American artists’ practices, the exhibition presents some of the most exciting and relevant practices in dialogue and draw out lines of connection and divergence in the aesthetics, histories and politics that inform how this diverse territory has been and still is imagined and reimagined,” says Kit Hammonds.
From 1973 to 1980, Ana Mendieta made the Siluetas series, one of her best-known series. Within this series there are several photographs and short videos of performances that were made after traveling to the archaeological site of Yagul, located in the central valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. The exhibition includes some pieces from of this group, among them Imagen de Yágul (1973) a photograph showing the artist lying in what appears to be a tomb inside the archaeological site, her naked body covered by weeds of white flowers that seem to allow her to become one with the landscape.
Mendieta spent several summers in Mexico searching for shared symbolism and connections to ancestral rituals that reminded her of her Cuban roots. At the age of twelve, Mendieta and her sister were sent to the United States without their parents, and she was not able to return to the island until 1980. The presence of ruins in her practice is related to the search for the past with which she wanted to reconnect; to connect with the homeland and, in doing so, repair her exile.
The installations of artist Minia Biabiany use natural elements to tell silenced stories about the French colony and assimilated territory of the island of Guadeloupe, where she was born and continues to live. Her installation the length of my gaze at night (2021) analyzes the contamination of the earth that affects the Guadeloupean population and how mental space and physical space influence one another. The installation proposes a path through which the viewer must watch every step, in order not to step on soil that has been distributed throughout the gallery floor in the form of a traditional fishing net, where the spectator’s body is an important component in the work’s narrative.
Nohemí Pérez is originally from Tibú, a municipality located in the Catatumbo region in Colombia. Through drawing, painting, and embroidery, the artist explores the different types of oppressions the territory has faced in both the community and nature. The Catatumbo region in Colombia is one of the territories most affected by the extractivist violence that leaves the colonial heritage almost intact in that place. El ruido del hombre (2023-24) explores, through five monumental paintings presented as a panorama, the destruction of the Amazon by wildfires. The artist colorfully embroiders endangered or extinct species over an Amazonian landscape drawn in charcoal, a material that refers to the mining exploitation of the region and related to the fires caused by climate change.
The artist and musicologist Vivian Caccuri investigates sound, or the lack of it, in a political, social, and historical context. Caccuri presents a new work made for this exhibition continuing her investigation into non-human sounds, agency, and movement. Ant House Music (2024) consists of a sound system in the shape of ants’ body parts that is used in the exhibition for a live performance, in collaboration with composer and musician Thiago Lanis, that emulates the sound the animals make, building into a danceable soundtrack. The speakers are cast in raw sugar from the Amazon and show the tracks of ants that have eaten into them. This cyclical reference demonstrates how social bodies, human and non-human, consume and move together.
For more than forty years, Vivian Suter has lived and painted at the top of a mountain in Panajachel, a village in Guatemala on the shores of Lake Atitlan, in what was once a coffee plantation. Suter’s work reflects the tropical landscape. Natural elements such as water, mud, earth, leaves and bark from the trees that surround her are part of her paintings. Suter’s works are shown in compositions that the artist creates in the exhibition spaces, organically arranging sets of paintings and, like a site-specific installation, organizing them one after the other, on the floor, on the walls, and in frames. Like in her studio, she uses the context of the gallery to mount her paintings and create sculptural forms, almost as if recreating the forest on the mountain where she paints them.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger uses the hybrid or electric automobile as a metaphor for a contemporary and futuristic landscape. For the artist, the interior of the car represents a colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal psychological space. It is through painting and embroidery that she penetrates these historically masculine spaces to turn them into provocative, feminine, queer, fantastic, sexual, and utopian spaces. Included in this exhibition is the major work Times Come to and End (2021), which binds together images of contemporary life and historical painting, as well as a new canvas made from the exhibition entitled Aquí la interpretación es confrontación: desmantelando a lo que le dio origen / Here interepretation is confrontation: dismantling what gave rise to it, (2024).
Simultaneously on view from October 26, 2024, to January 5, 2025 is Débora Delmar: Liberty & Security, an installation of new works expanding on recurring themes in Débora Delmar’s (Mexico, 1986) creative practice. Liberty & Security will investigate the physical and symbolic impact of architecture within urban environments, particularly focusing on issues such as gentrification, consumerism, and surveillance. The installation will prompt visitors to reflect on the effects of globalization on everyday life, with an emphasis on critiquing the privatization and homogenization of public space.
The Grotto. An Opera in Two Acts is an operatic installation by artist Clotilde Jiménez that explores migration, spirituality, and autonomy as the long-term impact of colonialism on rural towns. On view from October 26 until November 24, 2024, The Grotto proposes the concept of mesofuturism as a way of looking into the future and altering reality through the Mesoamerican cultural lens.
at Museo Jumex, Mexico City
until January 5, 2025