Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico
Fundación Jumex, Mexico City
March 27 – August 15, 2021

Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico is a thematic survey of contemporary art in Mexico over the past 20 years. Drawing primarily from the Colección Jumex with additional works by invited artists and collaborators, the exhibition will fill the entire museum with more than 60 works by artists based in Mexico, including those of international origin, and Mexican artists living and working abroad. The museum’s galleries will be stripped down to their original design for the exhibition, allowing for the installation of large-scale, conceptual works and ample natural light throughout the galleries.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by a term in micro history, the study of history from the perspective of individuals and their encounters with authority, and proposes the idea of looking from a grassroots perspective upwards, rather than from the top down. The exhibition will fill the entire museum with more than 60 works by artists based in Mexico, including those of international origin, and Mexican artists living and working abroad. 

In the third-floor gallery, three sections of the exhibition consider how common activities, materials, and objects have come to represent what is lost and how it may be recuperated. Portraits gathers artists that have engaged with what has been considered an outlying practice in contemporary art, yet increasingly part of daily life. Excavations includes artists that reveal material manifestations of time and history marked in particular objects and actions. Transformations looks at how such objects may become traces of events and people. Through their actions, the artists unsettle the established relationships between individuals and authorities. 

Normal Exceptions continues on the second-floor with three sections. Records examines and reanimates archaic recording technologies such as vinyl records and early electronic media. Markets explores places of formal and informal exchange. Interventions explores how artists interrupt the normal flow of daily life through public art. 

Throughout the run of the exhibition, the first-floor gallery will feature three different installations presented sequentially and curated in collaboration with an organization that has played a significant role in the formation of contemporary art in Mexico. The first is Paisajes, a series of activities organized in collaboration with the independent art space SOMA. Sessions led by Yoshua Okón, Eduardo Abaroa, TLC, and Adriana Salazar. Working with participants, each activity results in research material displayed in the gallery, building up through the course of the project and documented in a publication designed and produced in the same space. 

more. www.fundacionjumex.org