“30 YEARS IN THE ART WORLD. A REVISION OF THE BIENAL FEMSA”
Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato, León, 2024
While the past decade has witnessed many much-needed revisions to the hegemonic narratives of art (most of which I would frame under the umbrella of “curatorial activism”), revisiting the history behind an open-call exhibition organized by an affiliate company of Coca-Cola might seem infinitely less pressing. Yet “30 años en el mundo del arte. Una revisión de la bienal FEMSA” (30 Years in the Art World. A Revision of the Bienal FEMSA) more than fulfilled the promise of its subtitle by providing an overview of a period in which the exhibition underwent transformations that led it from a national contest when it was founded in 1992 to an exhibition of Latin American art beginning in 2010. In 2016 it became an itinerant curatorial platform, as it remains today.
Curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga, the exhibition culled works from FEMSA’s collection—1,300 pieces obtained via acquisition prizes and commissions—and arranged them into chronological nuclei. Through this approach, Garza sought to craft a history of Mexican contemporary art different from previous ones that extolled a few male figures. Thus the first nucleus spun a female universe rare, if present at all, within tales of the 1990s. In El alimento (The Nourishment), 1996, Claudia Fernández covered in blue paint with white sprinkles all sorts of domestic elements—kitchen and construction utensils, detergent bottles, garments, mass-produced sculptures, a baby walker, a gigantic spoon larger than human size—simulating the cheap and widely available Mexican porcelain. Also painted, a suit and two necklaces (the artist’s uniform?) hung from a wall. These otherwise unremarkable objects conjured a world in which artistic and menial—that is, feminized—labor were equated. Laura Quintanilla’s large-format painting Moradores (Inhabitants), 1992, offered a grimmer vision: a fragmented interior scene in which an anguished woman and her reflection are surrounded by male figures. Painted in black pigment with their outlines traced in white, the men seem emotionally distant.
Throughout the exhibition, Garza stressed FEMSA’s role in advancing installation art, a somewhat novel medium in Mexico three decades ago. Among other instances, an archaeologically classified collection of lost shoes found in the streets of Mexico City and placed inside Plexiglas boxes—Sandra Cabriada’s amusing Calzado de alta resistencia (High-Resistance Footwear), 2001—gave evidence of this. Still, more traditional media prevailed. Gabriel de la Mora’s Emiliano Morales de la Mora jugando . . . (Emiliano Morales de la Mora Playing . . . ), 2005, a large-format portrait of a child entirely made of natural and synthetic hair, proved that there was still room for innovation within the centuries-old discipline of drawing. But the inclusion of photography starting in 2004 infused new life into the contest. Oswaldo Ruiz’s masterful C-print Carburación (Carburation), 2005, in which a sparklingly lit yet desolate propane gas station is enshrouded within a pitch-black void, felt almost cinematic.
From 2010 to 2014, aiming to transcend its previous salon format, FEMSA invited foreign curators to diversify its biannual event and gain a broadly Latin American character. However, it wasn’t until 2016 that the Bienal FEMSA found its footing. Under a curatorial framework, artists were invited to respond each time to the context of the city chosen as host (the industrial city of León being the choice this year). Testament to that was Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s installation/photo novella La máquina distópica (The Dystopian Machine), 2018, inspired by the dire situation of two towns on the outskirts of the mining city of Zacatecas that were gravely afflicted by toxic waste. Displayed on a long black wall, it incorporated the work of renowned Zacatecanos Amparo Dávila (by “rewriting” one of her horror short stories) and painter Manuel Felguérez, employing his celebrated “aesthetic machine” to generate images.
The seemingly chaotic heterogeneity of the FEMSA collection, a major limitation to any less experienced curator, was turned by Garza into an asset. Instead of imposing a common theme, he allowed the works to speak for themselves, and, while telling the story of a small local biennial, he crafted something akin to a people’s history of Mexican contemporary art.