“The Gaps of Water: Recent Indigenous Art from Mexico”
Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2019Mexico, according to the anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, struggles to reconcile the two poles of its identity: Imaginary Mexico, which adheres to the Western project and seeks to propel it, and Deep Mexico, constituted by a resistant social base made up of the peoples who incarnate Mesoamerican civilization. This persistent conflict is reflected in the country’s contradictory attitudes toward the material culture of its indigenous peoples: While pre-Columbian artifacts are cherished as national treasures and exhibited with great fanfare in museums, the contemporary artistic output of indigenous creators is disregarded as disposable craft—the product of an underdeveloped aesthetic sensibility. “Los huecos del agua. Arte actual de pueblos originarios” (The Gaps of Water: Recent Indigenous Art from Mexico) attempted to counter such forms of discrimination. The exhibition engaged the social body of Mexican indigeneity not as a homogeneous mass trapped in a time capsule but as a group of historical subjects who partake in the modern languages of art as much as they do in the pressing issues that currently afflict their lives.