It’s the first week of February. In Mexico that means Mexico City Art Week is once again upon us. This year, the ever-expanding, week-plus of openings and events surrounding Latin America’s heavyweight constellation of fairs—Zona Maco, Material, and Salón Acme—promises to offer an antidote to the dark start to 2025, courtesy of Mexico City’s famed art scene. Nevertheless, recent news will mean the revelry will be ensconced in uncertainty. With Mexico’s new president Claudia Sheinbaum promising to continue her predecessor’s Morena political vision, and radical change promised by Donald Trump, inaugurated for his second term less than a month ago, questions around what this political clash will mean for Mexico and Mexico’s art landscape abound. It adds up to an informal macro theme of paradox. What happens when an immovable object means an unstoppable force?
With Sheinbaum’s assumption to office this past October comes a new Secretary of Culture, and a new round of art museum leaders, who have already been announced. It’s too soon to see how these new directors and curators will shift the programming and purview of the country’s top national museums, but despite the fresh ideas that this changing of the guard might bring, the culture ministry had its budget reduced by a whopping 27.8 percent.
Then there’s the art market, which in Mexico historically experiences a sales lag at the start of every new administration as local collectors often wait for new laws to be enacted and government contracts to be funded. Sheinbaum, who has inherited one of the largest government deficits since the 1980s, has promised to continue the previous administration’s austerity measures, which have impacted the country’s wealthiest. The outlook is further fogged with Trump’s deportations, which policy and economics leaders warn could negatively impact Mexico’s economy, further contributing to a potential sales slowdown. Add to this that 2024 saw a wave of galleries in CDMX closing shop.
Against this backdrop, perhaps the best antidote is to see art as a form of resistance, supporting the weirdo artists and small-scale dealers working against geopolitical and market headwinds to keep Mexico City’s scene vibrant. This moment then can be an opportunity to conspire and work together. (Artist Rachel Finkelstein’s mutual aid collective GringoTax.MX, for example, offers advice on how to visit and live in Mexico as a foreigner in ways that aren’t extractive.) To that end, here are some of the best under-the-radar shows, performances, and goings-on that will be on view during Mexico City Art Week.
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Enrique López Llamas at Llano Gallery
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Llano Gallery Enrique López Llamas’s latest solo exhibition presents an arrangement of sculptures, paintings and film vignettes anchored by a central video piece. In “El otro protangonista de la noche,” curated by critic Gaby Cepeda, López Llamas explores ideas of failure, performance, repetition, and identity, and how the artifice implicit in art creation points to the artifice in constructing our own selves. The paintings which surround the project form a mise-en-scène, propped up as if waiting for their turn in the warehouse of one’s memories.
Through March 15, at Llano Galeria, Dr Lucio 181, Col. Doctores.
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El Arrogante Albino at Vernacular Institute
Image Credit: Courtesy the artists and Vernacular Institute For this year’s art week, Guadalajara-based artist collective El Arrogante Albino presents a five-hour, site-specific durational work at alternative space Vernacular Institute, an independent project space focused on durational and performance art founded by curator Jo Ying Peng. Placing the concept of “invitation” at the heart of the performance, Por invitación takes its name from the artist’s intention to reflect on institutional hospitality, examining the dynamics between guest, host, and space. Through time-based movement improvisation, El Arrogante Albino blurs the boundaries between seeing and being seen, orchestrating interactions that invite audiences to reflect on innovative body-spaces and the immaterial exchanges they create.
Through February 9, at Vernacular Institute, Sabino 276, Col. Sta María La Ribiera.
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Anna Hernández at Campeche Gallery
Image Credit: Photo Ramiro Chaves/Courtesy the artist and Campeche Gallery Anna Hernández, an emerging artist from Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, will have her first ever solo show this week at Campeche Gallery. The show, titled “Ladi Beñe,” is based on a pre-Hispanic dance ritual called Son del Pez Espada and narrates the story of a fisherman trying to catch a swordfish, regarded by the Binnizá (Zapotecs) of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (present-day Oaxaca) as “the creator of the first day.” Historically performed by men, this dance symbolizes the Binnizá creation myth, linked through oral tradition to the gods, the creation of the world, and the first men and women. The central work in the exhibition is a sawfish sculpture covered in mud and encrusted with gold. Also on view are several canvases on to which the artist draws with a mixture of water and soil, as well as a video performance, filmed by Binnizá photographer Luvia Lazo. In the video, Hernández reenacts the traditional Son del Pez dance in a mud puddle.
Through March 29 at Campeche Gallery, Campeche 130, Col Roma Sur.
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Lucía Vidales at Galería Karen Huber
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Galería Karen Huber “Pillo y Bebé” is the second presentation by Monterrey-based painter Lucía Vidales at Karen Huber. In this suite of paintings, Vidales invites us to immerse ourselves in a fantastic and poetic universe where she explores a dialogue between the innocent and the mischievous. As the show’s title, which translates to “Cute and Wild,” suggests, the works on view refer to a duality in bodies. Working from her imagination, Vidales’s paintings home in on a tension between naivety and mischief. Her compositions invert ideas of living and dead beings, not just as bodies that allow us to discern fluids, limbs, and fragments, but also their emergence as phenomena of painting: colors, matter, paint built up and scratched away.
Opening February 4, at Galería Karen Huber, Bucareli 120-piso 1, Col. Centro.
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“¿Como se escribe muerte al sur?” at Museo Anahuacalli
Image Credit: Photo Karla Niño de Rivera/Courtesy the artist “¿Cómo se escribe muerte al sur?” (How do you spell death in the south?) is a two-person exhibition of two Mexico City–based artists, Carolina Fusilier and Paloma Contreras Lomas. The show responds to the phantasmagoric imagination of the museum, which Mexican muralist Diego Rivera created as a temple to house his collection of pre-Hispanic objects and where he hoped to be buried when he died. (He is interred at the Panteón Civil de Dolores cemetery in Mexico City.) Through videos, sound installations, sculptures, and paintings, the artists will transform the museum into the site of a fictional thriller mixing personal views on death with the symbols embedded in this enigmatic museum, conceived as both a monument and mausoleum.
While the Museo Anahuacalli invokes a specific set of ghosts, museums more broadly function as mausoleums and as machines for resurrection by contextualizing objects through new exhibitions. In “¿Cómo se escribe muerte al sur?” Fusilier and Contreras Lomas seek to establish mystical bridges that articulate their notions of immortality and a Mesoamerican futurism crossed and interrupted by Western modernity.
On view February 4 to June 8, at Museo Anahuacalli, Museo 150, San Pablo Tepetlapa, Col. Coyoacán.
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Rottenbar at Olivia Foundation
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Olivia Foundation Rottenbar is a new site-specific immersive art bar/cafe installation by Argentina-born, New York–based artist Mika Rottenberg commissioned by the Olivia Foundation, launched last year by ARTnews Top 200 Collectors Jana Sanchez Osorio and Guillermo Gonzalez Guajardo. The forms of Rottenbar are playful and organic, mimicking a natural growth of trees or almost a large-scale bouquet of wooden branches covered in brightly colored, sometimes light-up, mushrooms. Planted among these forms are tabletops. Both these surfaces and mushrooms are made from plastic that the artist has reclaimed into a primary sculptural and building material. This material, and the process by which she reimagines, reshapes, and reconfigures it, are at the heart of this project.
Known for her surreal works about labor, Rottenberg used plastic detritus gathered from the city for this project, using it to produce her inorganic sculptural forms. Acknowledging plastic’s ubiquity, Rottenberg has referred to it as a kind of “natural resource” that is a twinned state of constant manufacturing and quick disposal. With the bar she is modeling the possibility of making functional things out of a material that will be with us forever.
Through February 16, at Olivia Foundation, Tonalá 46, Col. Roma.
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Feral. Arte Espacio Público
Image Credit: Courtesy Feral Launching this year, Feral. Arte Espacio Público aims to be an alternative to art week’s constellations of fairs by providing Mexican artist-run spaces a platform to exhibit in the plaza surrounding La Explanada de Monumento a la Madre. Organized by Galeria Tianguis Neza and supported by Museo Experimental El Eco, the project brings together 16 curatorial projects, 12 initiatives from independent spaces and collectives, and a section of art publications and zines, as well as a gastronomy offering. The selection of alternative and artist-run projects span several generations and across several states in Mexico.
Open February 6–9, at La Explanada de Monumento a la Madre, Av. Insurgentes Sur y Calzada Manuel Villalongín, Col. Cuauhtémoc.
