RUINA 2000, Isabel la Catolica 231, Mexico City  (MX)
17/08/2017 - 07/09/2017
(Group exhibition)

with Melquiades Herrera, Guillermo Santamarina, Felipe Ehrenberg, Juan José Gurrola, Karla Kaplun, Santiago Merino, Romeó Gómez López & Diego Cid, Alonso Cedillo, Sarah Minter, Santiago Mohar, Pablo Cendejas, Natalia Marmolejo, José Eduardo Barajas, David Miranda


Curated by:   Pablo Cendejas

 

Ruin 2000 is a curatorial endeavour with the purpose of displaying a contention, that parts from fictional economical, political and social statutes, put forward by centralised, mexican governmental initiatives.

These gave way to what is being shown, performed or speculated in the current venue.

Works on display were specifically made for this project, with the aim of being contrasted by reinterpretations of earlier pieces, by artists whose work shaped an alternative path to producing and distributing, not

concurring with figures, who later on became prominent by adopting a dogmatic notion of neutral architecture, capable of displaying ideologically erosioned cultural initiatives, while optimising visibility. An alternative view

was achieved, on how the denomination of worth, or value was structured locally, while refusing a kind of distribution based on displaying stabilised results.

Regarding the consumption of symbolic assets, Mexico was greatly influenced after the NAFTA by imported televised content. Regardless of quality, these contents where broadcasted, and privileged by lack of com­petition, deploying a set of values, that targeted young receptors, increasing their adaptability to democratic, consumerist, radical views.

Meanwhile, relatively recent paradigms from the United States, identifiable within so called conceptualism, were being applied through emotional strategies to the mexican situation of the moment, generating thus a turning point without which is difficult to talk about mexican contemporary art. Some mexican artists upgraded to cos­mopolitan ways of showing work (or being shown as work themselves), and made it simultaneously

polemic and neat to the eye, maintaining a mildly controversial, politica theme.

Correspondingly, it was the inconspicuous strata of the comfortable bourgeoise, who mimetized the aesthetic and moral values proposed by the incoming, northern massive entertainment, consisting mainly of comedy.

Ideology takes the shape of a medium, in a broad sense. On the other hand, the specific effectivity of the craft, with which the medium is used, is determined by how far it lies from being subject to description by its own means.

The NAFTA imposes power over the dynamics of production because it exists outside of the logic of produc­tion and yet, its reach circumscribes specific human interactions, while being incapable of stipulating its own

scope as a political entity of any measure, within any statute.

Due to the obscure composition of its legitimacy, -which operates under the same logic of witchery or sha­manism- the regulation seeks perfection through abstraction, and the effective operation under HER, depends on how an individual is able to consequently decipher the nature of a certain set of legal parameters that will constantly vary, being the written aspect of the parameter subordinate to a locutionary context.

Is it true that job scarcity could’ve been ended had mexicans started listening to U2?

When regulations become so easy to follow that they are nullified, it will be the majority which will enjoy the privileges of government, or the lack thereof. In the case of all contemporary legal systems, we learn that the

language of the law is elitist, and unfair. This last principle applies to the trade agreements made under the framework of the law.

This exhibition is about an image of a gone and past Mexico, and

perceiving it is made possible by art that was not made, and that is, in its

essence alternative.

-- Pablo Cendejas (August 2017)

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