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13 February 2024
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ART WORLD


A FOCUS ON CORPOREALITY AND QUEERNESS AT MEXICO CITY ART WEEK

Here’s what was on offer during the 2024 edition of CDMX Art Week.


A performance at Salón Acme, 2024. Courtesy of Salón Acme.

by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei February 12, 2024

Whether it was at the private party for the opening of Gabriel Orozco’s solo
show at Kurimanzutto or the long line waiting for Ubers outside of ZonaMaco, I
heard the same line over and over again, “I haven’t been to CDMX art week in
years.” Maybe it was the promise of warm weather after a bit of measly New York
snow, a strong peso, or that enough time had passed since the “new normal”
became, simply, normal, but whatever the reason, it’s been one of the busiest
editions of Mexico City’s Art Week (which includes the headline fair ZonaMaco as
well as Material and Salon Acme) in quite some time. Art advisors, PR heads, and
curators came flocking in numbers, spamming their Instagram stories with
pictures of the whole grilled fish at Contramar or shots from inside the week’s
most exclusive parties. Gallerists too, have had a lot to celebrate, reporting
strong sales as a great deal of Latin American artists have been tapped to show
at the upcoming Venice Biennale.  



A WARM WELCOME

Mexican art institutions and artists, for their part, have been eager to act as
the good host. 

“A lot of care goes into creating dynamic events for the VIP programs for
ZonaMaco and Material, the amount of offerings they have, from lectures to open
studios, is unique compared to other fairs,” said Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas,
curator and director of exhibitions at the Queens-based Socrates Sculpture Park,
who has been attending the CDMX art week for the past ten years. “New York has a
very different vibe, it would almost seem crazy to try and schedule a studio
visit during Frieze New York, right? But here there seems to be an incredible
capacity to host and entertain.”

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Yet, this is just the complaint a lot of younger Mexicans in the art scene have
with established institutions–that they cater too much to the foreigners, just
as their government does. Recent years have brought a wash of digital nomads and
subsequent rent hikes that resulted in a great deal of resentment towards expat
gentrifiers. This only worsened when the Mexican government made a deal with
AirBnB instead of regulating it. Despite these difficulties, CDMX Art Week has
always been an encouraging example of what an art scene could and should be:
intensely multigenerational, collaborative, and lacking the intense hierarchies
of the art world in New York. But this year that sense of intimacy contracted as
the lists for parties and exclusive openings swelled with foreign visitors. 



Installation view at Salon Acme, in Mexico City, 2024.

The past editions of Art Week that I’ve attended I’ve done so with my cousin at
my side. A student at the public and much-lauded art university La Esmeralda,
we’d hit events together, from fancy cocktail hours to performances in DIY
spaces. But to my embarrassment, this year we were often on opposite sides of
the guest list. I’d pop into something and he’d have to wait outside for
me—mortifying. Working as an art handler for OMR’s large exhibition space Lago
Algo in the Bosque de Chapultepec (Mexico City’s Central Park) he’d typically
get an invite for their big party. This year, no dice. Is what’s good for the
market bad for the scene? Mexico City-based art workers that I’ve spoken to have
complained that even though Mexican galleries have been doing well selling to
expats and foreigners, their salaries haven’t risen. What’s this success worth
(i.e. the influx of dollars and euros) if the money stays at the top?

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom. There was great art on view from a spate of
artists both established and up-and-coming. Here’s what Mexico City had to offer
during the 2024 edition of CDMX Art Week:

QUEER ARTISTS TO THE FRONT

ZonaMaco’s Ejes section, which highlights younger galleries, set the tone with
curator Bernardo Mosqueira’s theme of pleasure and politics. Throughout the
section, visions of queer life, love, and sex abounded with offerings from Romeo
Gómez López at Galerie Éric Mouchet, Boris Torres at Kates-Ferri, Gonzalo Garcia
at CAM Galeria, Levan Mindiashvili at Window Projects and others. But outside
the Ejes section there was plenty of queer art to be had as well, such as the
tender paintings of Carlos Rodriguez at Hashimoto Contemporary and the
performances of La Maga, an artist and drag queen who restaged Gretta Sarfaty’s
1978 performance Enlace at São Paulo’s Central Galeria’s booth, which was
showing works of Sarfaty’s, including documentation of the original
performance. 



A detail from Juni Aranda Rubli’s Packer. Photo: Annika Sunne. Courtesy of the
artist.

Queer artists were also well represented at Material, Salon Acme, and other
gallery shows. At Proyectos Multipropósito, the young transmasc artist Juni
Aranda Rubli sold a series of five paintings titled ‘Packer’ to an unnamed
Mexican collector. A recent graduate of La Esmeralda, Aranda Rubli has noted a
shift in queer representation in Mexican galleries.

“Recently there has been a big push in the galleries to include more queer
artists,” said Aranda Rubli. “But there’s a pretty specific profile of the queer
artist that’s being included–gay-cis– especially at the bigger galleries.” It’s
the smaller galleries, collectives and curator-led projects by trans creators,
like Lolita Pank and Museo de Arte Transfemenino, that are the exception, Aranda
Rubli noted. “There’s definitely a trend in ‘trans art’ of corporeality and of
identity which goes hand in hand with the public’s recent recognition of the
idea of transness itself.”

HANDS, SHOULDERS, FEET AND TOES! 

This interest in corporeality extends beyond queer art, however. Walking through
the Material art fair it was hard to keep count of the body parts on display.. 



An attendee at Zona Maco 2024. Photo by Rodrigo Oropeza/AFP via Getty Images.

“Oh you want to know the trend? It’s hands,” said Christopher Rivera, co-founder
of the San Juan-based Embajada Gallery. He pointed to the booths surrounding
his, “Hands, hands, hands.” It was true, across the way at the Buenos
Aires-based Pasto, a series of five wooden hands carved by Federico Cantini,
next to that, at the Madrid-based Ryder Projects, a totemic sculpture Blind
Toucan, Madre Drone (2020) by Patricia Domínguez, featuring a gray hand jutting
out from a shroud of artificial hair and colored feathers. At Rivera’s own
booth, Georgina Treviño’s various pieces were packed together like an altar to
Northern Mexico’s maximalist ranchero aesthetics, centered around a mannequin’s
hand sporting nails made of mussel shells studded with rhinestones. “We’re
paying more attention to our bodies,” Rivera mused. 

All hands on deck with works by Michael Ross at Galería Mascota, Romeo Gómez
López at Salon Silicon, and Patricia Domínguez at the Ryder Projects.

Yet, there’s a literally disembodied aspect to almost all of the hand centered
pieces on view at Material. From Romeo Gómez López animatronic sculpture of a
silicon hand swishing a iced coffee at Salon Silicon or Michael Ross’s Sir Tim
(2023) in which a hand cut off that the wrist pets the head of a 3D rendered
calico cat at Galería Mascota, the hand is an appendage. A lonely view of our
own bodies as we see them, holding, caressing, typing, cutting, attached to the
thing we cannot see fully, ourselves. 

 


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