Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
Mexico City
2026
In collaboration with Cristina Garrido
Assistant curator:
Carolina Díaz Berthet
Museographic design:
Lanza Atelier
Thanks to:
Alias Editorial - Daniela Gil
Alejandra España
Alicia Medina
Antonio Juárez
Armando Cristeto
Centro de Documentación Arkheia MUAC - Mariana Camargo, Elva Peniche Montfort
Centro de Documentación Ex Teresa Arte Actual
Cristóbal Gracia
Damián Ortega
Diana Mariani
Estudio Damián Ortega - Marisol Noble
FOCO Lab
Galería Curro
Kurt Johannessen
Maribel Escobar Varillas
Mauricio Galguera
Mónica Naranjo
Nuria Montiel Pérez-Grovas
This exhibition was partially made possible thanks to the support of Spain’s Ministry of Culture.
LOS PANTEONES DEL PERFORMANCE
Despite presenting itself as an iconoclastic art form, performance art—or action art—has, from its very beginnings, left behind a wide range of material traces. Among these, photographs have served as the primary medium through which the history of this ephemeral practice—often oppositional and enacted through the body—has been constructed. Produced predominantly in black and white, these records have shaped not only how performance is seen, but also how it circulates, is interpreted, and ultimately remembered.
Los panteones del performance (The Pantheons of Performance) focuses on the displacements through which these images are translated, reproduced, intervened upon, and recontextualized. Through these processes, images accrue successive layers that alter their status: do they remain mere documents, or have they become artworks in their own right? At what point do they cease to refer to an event and instead acquire autonomy? These trajectories—from the live event to the photograph, from photograph to drawing or an intervened image; from body to camera and then to hand—constitute a kind of matryoshka of authorships. Each iteration is shaped by concrete decisions that have historically remained invisible. It is precisely through these operations that certain images become iconic, gradually eclipsing the actions from which they originated.
The term pantheon operates here in a double sense: while some images are canonized, others—preserved across different archives—lie in a state of perpetual slumber. Situated within the context of Mexico, whose genealogy of performance art has remained peripheral to international narratives—as "global" as the supposedly "universal" history of art itself—the project is grounded in research conducted in institutional archives. Through a series of artistic interventions, these materials are translated into installations, videos, and drawings that question the conditions of their visibility.
The exhibition emerged from a collaboration initiated by Cristina Garrido and Fabiola Iza in 2024, centered on examining the strategies through which images are hierarchized within art history. This dialogue between artist and curator is informed by a shared inquiry into the feminization of labor and chromophobia, understood as an ideological construct rooted in an aversion to color. By reactivating archival records, displacing their original contexts, and subjecting them to new forms of translation, the exhibition examines the relations of power, authorship, and exclusion that shape these historical narratives.