The work of 30 Mexican artists will travel to Spain to show women’s “continuous struggles”. An exhibition organized by the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico brings together more than 40 works by artists such as Helen Escobedo, Teresa Margolles, Mónica Mayer or Magalí Lara, who denounce sexist violence or question the role traditionally attributed to women. Fighters: Women in the MUAC collection also aims to make visible the heterogeneity of women’s art. The exhibition will be on view at the Casa de México in Madrid from February 24th to May 21st and there will also be virtual tours.
The title of the exhibition, Luchadoras, refers to a series of photographs that Lourdes Grobet began in the early 1980s. In it, the artist documents the universe of wrestling in Mexico. But it also refers to the “constant struggles” of women. “Women have had to struggle to build a social space of visibility,” Amanda de la Garza, director of MUAC, said Wednesday in the exhibition’s online presentation. Currently, 25% of the artists in the museum’s collection are women, one of the highest percentages among Mexican institutions. For several years, MUAC, which has the largest public collection of contemporary art in Latin America, has been trying to include women in its collections.
An image from the “Welcome to Lipstick” series on display in Madrid. Maya Goded (courtesy)
“The exhibition aims to show the urgency of changing our cultural references,” said Rosa Beltrán, cultural dissemination coordinator at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “It’s about turning the world upside down,” he added. The author has clarified that “there is no aesthetic or methodological vision that unifies the artistic practices of these women”. “It is not meant to demonstrate that there is a common way of looking at the world, that there is a female art. What appears is heterogeneity,” he specified. The selection, which only includes pieces from the MUAC collection, includes examples from painting, photography, video, textile art and other formats that address different themes: some question gender roles, others try to create identity, others denounce violence. .
One of the 46 works in the exhibition is El tendedero by Mónica Mayer, who in the late 1970s asked 800 women to say “What I like least about the city as a woman is …”. The result is a metal structure with pink paper hanging from it, which opens up a dialogue about the violence experienced by women in public spaces. There is also Cascada, a large-format installation by Marta Palau, also created in the late 1970s. Hanging from the ceiling, the sculpture is made of translucent tubes, inside which are small plush nodules for textile work.
“Protected,” by artist Teresa Margolles.Teresa Margolles (courtesy)
There are also more recent works by artists such as Dulce Pinzón, who began the photographic series The True Story of Superheroes after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. The images show Latino immigrants in the US, for example, dressing up as Wonder Woman in the laundry room or disguised as the Hulk while unloading bananas from a truck. You can also see the work of Teresa Margolles Encobijados, which consists of seven blankets used to wrap the bodies of organized crime victims in Mexico. Or Welcome to Lipstick by Maya Gode, which documented sex work in Reynosa, Tamaulipas between 2009 and 2013. There is also a work by María José de la Macorra and another by María Ezcurra that have never been exhibited.
The “heterogeneity” exhibited by the works “shows women’s attitudes toward art,” said Pilar García, curator of the exhibition. The 30 exhibits in the exhibition were selected by the curator as “keys” in the history of contemporary art. “It’s pieces that went a step further back then, that change the canon,” he said. García has warned that “new readings” as proposed by the exhibition are made “gradually”: “Change is not made with an exhibition. The great exhibitions that have been [fuera de México] They come from creative men, but we’re here to put things right. This example is a tribute to them [a las mujeres] the place they should occupy.
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