Conaculta Inba

Foro México 68

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
This text was read at the openning sesión of the forum México 68. A Cincuenta Años, at Aula Magna José Vasconcelos, Centro Nacional de las Artes, on October 4, 2018. Continuar Leyendo →

TO PUBLIC OPINION

 
 
The Academic Council of the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas (Cenidiap), of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), hereby expresses its concern regarding the works being carried out at the building once occupied by the former Secretaría de Comunicaciones, Transportes y Obras Públicas, (SCOP), in Eje Central and Xola, in Mexico City. We request that INBA make a public pronouncement in defense of the preservation and restoration of the murals and sculptures located in the building, through its corresponding department, in conformity with the laws regarding the protection of Mexico’s artistic heritage.
Continuar Leyendo →

The Interplay of Past and Present. Hélio Oiticica at Museo Jumex

Andrés Reséndiz Rodea
 
 
Is it posible for a work of art, dating back 50 years, to offer a contemporary sensory experience with elements of the future? In 1967, perhaps without this being his main goal, Hélio Oiticica (Río de Janerio, 1937-1980) produced a work exploring the possibility of including variable and random stimuli from eras as removed from his as our own. This was made possible by a particular element he introduced in his creative work. We will reflect uopn this in this article. Continuar Leyendo →

An Instant On the Road. Alejandro Gómez de Tuddo’s Exhibition at Cenart

Rubí Aguilar Cancino
 
 

Death is a lived life. Life is a coming death.

Jorge Luis Borges

 
 
The main theme of the second International Photography Festival FotoMéxico was Latitudes, an invitation to explore the geographical, anthropological and disciplinary diversity in contemporary photography. Works were exhibited along four axis: Politics and Society; Landscape and Territory; Traces and Memory; and Body and Identity. Continuar Leyendo →

Ways of Seeing: Yolanda Ceballos’ Transitions

Alejandra Estrada
 
 
The collective exhibition Modos de ver ran between January 26 and April 29, 2018, at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City. It was curated by Tatiana Cuevas and presented in coordination with Programa Bancomer (fifth edition), with an aim to promote nine young artists selected by a jury and backed by renowned advisors, like Carlos Amorales, from an interdisciplinary research project centered on analizing and debating new ways of producing and seeing contemporary art in al lof its diversity. I thank the museum for the information it provided. Continuar Leyendo →

Episodio by Estrella Carmona and 7102 Fantasma Semiótico SCituacionista

María Eugenia Garmendia Carbajal and Edwina Moreno Guerra
 
 
Estrella Carmona is one of the artists under consideration within our research project at Cenidiap: ‘Representaciones Apocalípticas, Catastróficas y Silentes en el Arte Pictórico Contemporáneo Mexicano’. We visited two exhibitions of her work: a solo show at Museo de Arte de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, and a collective exhibition at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. Continuar Leyendo →

Carlos Amorales at MUAC: Axioms for Action (1996-2018)

Edwina Moreno Guerra
 
 
It is remarkable for a young Mexican artist like Carlos Amorales (Mexico City, 1970) to exhibit at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC).
Havig lived and trained in Europe (1990-2004), he returned to Mexico as an established artist. This exhibition showcases pieces from different and even disparate genres. The effort invested in developing each piece is apparent; spectators have to concentrate in order to fully appreciaate them. There are no distinctive marks to give the show a degree of coherence, but if we were told that this is actually a collective exhibition we would promptly believe it, because he engages with so many artistic disciplines: drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, performance, installation, sound art, cinema, writing, and other non traditional forms. Continuar Leyendo →

An approach to Neuroesthetics: Artistic Creation and Expression

Blanca Estela Lamadrid Palomares
 
 
Why is it said that art creation and appreciation are produced in the brain? In the last decade, more information has been gathered about the brain than in all the preceding history of scientific research on its functioning. Interest in the research of art and the neuronal connections required for artistic creation expands today over several cultural and scientific fields. Biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, architects, mathematicians, physicists, and neurologists take on aesthetic problems. Continuar Leyendo →

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Mexican (IN)documentado

Edwina Moreno
 
 
One might say that now is “the moment” for Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s art. Looking into his life and work, one discovers that political decisions by President Trump against Mexican immigrants provide a timely space for Gómez-Peña’s artistic actions. This Mexican artist migrated to the USA when he was young; his thoughts regarding Chicanos do not stem from a political, social, or human rights perspective, not even from a conventional artistic point of view, but rather from the standpoint of a contemporary artist whose expression is both empathic and experiential, since he has felt the brunt of discrimination suffered by so many of our fellow Mexicans. Continuar Leyendo →

The Oscillation of Time

María Eugenia Garmendia Carbajal
 
 
It was just after sunrise… the clock read 7:19 when an earthquake shook Mexico City on September 19, 1985. It took just two minutes for it to destroy several buildings, taking the lives of thousands of people residing or working in the Cuauhtémoc, Venustiano Carranza, Benito Juárez, Gustavo A. Madero, Miguel Hidalgo and Coyoacán areas of the city. . It was an 8.1 magnitude earthquake, the epicenter was located in the Pacific Ocean shore, in the border between the states of Michoacán and Guerrero. The 7.6 aftershock the following evening brought down several buildings that had been structurally damaged.
Continuar Leyendo →

Apocalyptic, catastrophic and silent representations in contemporary Mexican painting

Adriana Zapett, Edwina Moreno y María Eugenia Garmendia
 
 
Introduction
 
 
One of the modalities of contemporary Mexican painting seems troubling to us, as it displays the self-destructive potential of human beings both individually and collectively, bearing witness to angst and hopelessness. In images of strange beauty, dealing with cruelty and the tearing apart, the injury or mutilation of the body, or perhaps the crumbling down of an imaginary space represented on canvas, the painter transforms the death drive into figurability. (1) Continuar Leyendo →

Inaugural Session of the VII Conference on Research and Documentation in the Visual Arts

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
Read at Aula Magna, Cenart, Mexico City, October 18, 2017
 
 
Good morning.
 
 
On behalf of the National Center for Research, Documentation and Information on the Visual Arts (Cenidiap) it is an honor to welcome you to this

VII Conference on Research and Documentation in the Visual Arts

. I appreciate the presence of the authorities of the National Arts Center (Cenart) and the General Subdirection of Arts Education and Research (SGEIA) of the National Institute of Fie Arts (INBA) who are joining us here today, as well as the participation of both the speakers and the audience, here at this conference room and through the internet. Continuar Leyendo →

Conference on the Aesthetics of Science Fiction

Carlos Guevara Meza
 
 
Read at Aula Magna, Cenart, Mexico City, on November 23, 2017.
 
 

Good morning.
 
 
On behalf of the National Center for Research, Documentation and Information on the Visual Arts, I warmly welcome you to this Conference on the Aesthetics of Science Fiction, whose purpose it is to think in earnest the depths of something which, regrettably in my opinion, is regarded by many (and even if it were by just one it would still be too much) as mere entertainment, both ordinary and superficial, except for a handful of established masterworks. Continuar Leyendo →

The garden as a house

Carmen Gómez del Campo
 
 
Thank you all for being here with us in the presentation of the catalogue El jardín como casa, the ceramics creation trajectory of Mariana Velázquez. I thank INBA, Cenart and Cenidiap for providing us with this space to show you how a house surrounded by a garden becomes a warm, welcoming place, inhabited by nature, intertwined with ceramic pieces created by Mariana. Thanks to her, as well, for allowing us to enter her fantastic garden. Continuar Leyendo →

RESISTING FOR LIFE

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
If Felipe Ehrenberg (1943-2017) were still here, we would have discussed the gatherong resistance against the State’s so-called “historical truth” about Ayotzinapa, through slogans, texts, and graphic art, constantly moving not only in Mexico and the United States, but in Europe and other far-off places. The rural and popular roots of the Ayotzinapa relatives meet libertarian intelectual lucidity, bringing about a high-impact knowledge all over the world, against the systemic corruption of late capitalism. Continuar Leyendo →

AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Arturo García Bustos died of a heart attack while an exhibition of his and Rina Lazo’s work -organized by Dina Comisarenco- was still open to the public at the library of Universidad Iberoamericana. The beloved maestro passed away at the Red House in Coyoacán; some people call it the House of Malinche, but I prefer the former name, with its association with the color that identifies all communists. Continuar Leyendo →

Rediscovering Mural Paintings: Works for Children by Carlos Mérida and Emilio Amero

Guillermina Guadarrama Peña
 
 
In August, 2016, restorers from Centro Nacional de Conservación y Registro del Patrimonio Artístico Mueble, INBA (CNCRPAM) , began preservation work on the mural paintings located at what is today the Belisario Domínguez grammar school, in Colonia Guerrero, Mexico City. The hallway, the corridors on both floors and some classrooms are covered with paintings made by students from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda in the 1950’s. Back then, the school was in the opposite building and it was a suitable place for carrying out student practices. Antonio M. Ruiz, Pablo O’Higgins and Arnold Belkin were mural painting teachers at different times in that period. Continuar Leyendo →

Building an Utopia

Laura González Matute
 
 

This text was read on June 9, 2016, at Aula Magna José Vasconcelos, Centro Nacional de las Artes, during the presentation of the book La construcción de una utopía. Enseñanza artística en la posrevolución (Building an Utopia. Arts Education After the Revolution), Mexico, Conaculta, INBA, Cenidiap, 2015, 168 p.
Continuar Leyendo →

Boltanski. Un pueblo de fantasmas

Marie-Christine Camus
 
 
This text was read at a round table, “Incomplete traces. Identity, memory and oblivion”, on May 24, 2016, as a parallel activity to the exhibition Animitas. Christian Boltanski, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, January 21 – June 5, 2016.
  Continuar Leyendo →

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A figuration of outrage

Alfredo Gurza
 
 
In June, 2015, at Café 123, Suad, an artist born in Casablanca, Morocco, residing in Mexico City since 2010, exhibited through the One Month | One Artist initiative her piece entitled Entrelazados, (Entwined), a work that distills her artistic practice, accumulated through successive purifying and deepening processes in her studious journey through Lyon, London and New York. It is also the announcement of her new domain: both as knowledge/craft and as a territory for semiotic research. Continuar Leyendo →

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A Memorial to Violence

Cristina Híjar González
 
 
A year after the forced disappearance of the 43 students of Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa, and the brutal murder of three others, the slogans of the day are:
They took them away alive, we want them back alive! The State did it! Continuar Leyendo →

Approaches to Political Graphic Art as Discourse

In the late 1970’s, Mario Benedetti wrote the poetry collection Letras de emergencia, which included a prologue under the title “Canto libre y arte de emergencia”, [“Free Song and Emergency Art”].(1) In it, he stresses the urgent need to raise one’s voice against unreason, expressly alluding to the song by Daniel Viglietti, who was at that time a political prisoner in Uruguay. I see no objection to extending the poet’s considerations to all artistic expressions raising from the terrible conjunctures of our histories. Benedetti states that someone will not fail to wonder how we can have the time and the willingness to sing, paint or dance; he points out that these expressions produce an aesthetic effect, interpellate in another way, bring us affectively closer, build a community: Continuar Leyendo →

Exhibition Morphologies. Fine Arts Palace Museum: 1934-2014

Ana Garduño
 
 
Curatorial policy at what is today known as the Fine Arts Palace Museum has always been particularly notorious when it comes to the visual arts; this is due in large measure to its status as an official art gallery. Its exhibitions have had greater cultural significance, not only in its natural area of influence, Mexico City, but also in the interior of the country. Historiographically, the success of its montages, especially those that received positive evaluations by both specialists and the general public, have even radiated over cultural capitals with a certain museistic power, above all in Latin America. Continuar Leyendo →

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43 Times Seven Months

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Certain that the State did it, commemorations rise up a notch, developing autonomies and self-governance. On Saturday the 25th, the Santo Domingo, Los Pedregales, neighborhood welcomed the Ayotzinapa parents, and as it has done every month for the past nine years, a survivor from the Acteal massacre, who is enduring an unending rehab process because of the seven bullets she received. There was delicious pozole and tamales, followed by a testimonial reflection and the report made by the neighborhood organizations. In solidarity, one of the houses now shows on its metal gate the faces of the 43. Twenty-five collective murals testify to this solidarity; some of them include portraits of the victims, their names, and their mothers bearing these testimonials. One of the murals reproduces an engraving by Arturo García Bustos, dating from over fifty years ago, with an armed Zapata pointing directly at the spectator and a sign that reads: “And what have you done to defend the conquests for which we gave our lives?” Continuar Leyendo →

Galeano

Alberto Híjar Serrano
 
 
Open Veins of Latin America rightly replaced those linear-history manuals, centered on Nation-State building and with only veiled references to colonial and imperial outrages. Official texts never mention guerrillas and bandits: they are the dirty war, a side chapter beyond presidents and laws. Continuar Leyendo →