Monday, November 17, 2008

Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo – MUAC



After announcing the opening of the first major public museum to be built in Mexico City in 30 years, the UNAM extends an open invitation to visit its first cycle of exhibitions, and to celebrate the four-year process of constructing the idea, the building, and the collection. 

Conceived by newly appointed Curator, Guillermo Santamarina along with the MuAC team, the opening party begins at 6:30 PM, Wednesday November 26th, with an unusual array of instrumental pieces by emerging artists.

Recursos incontrolables y otros desplazamientos naturales
(Uncontrollable Resources and Other Natural Displacements):

A selection from the permanent collection.

Curated by Oliver Debroise, who was responsible for the acquisitions program until his untimely death, earlier this year, this exhibition is the first installation of the MuAC's permanent collection. According to Debroise, "The selection seeks, in this case, to underline the tensions and contradictions between artistic practice as a mechanical and 'unnatural' act that distorts the order of things with the purpose of revealing their foundations, and the constant references to nature including, of course, the temporal dimension of memory, the methods for understanding time, and communication systems." 

Artists. Mauricio Alejo, Francis Alÿs, Iñaki Bonillas, Calimocho Styles, Juan Francisco Elso, Mario García Torres, Isa Genzken, Thomas Glassford, Silvia Gruner, Jan Hendrix, Enrique Ježik, Yishai Jusidman, Gabriel Kuri, Marcos Kurtycz, Richard Long, Teresa Margolles, Erick Meyenberg, Robert Morris, Edgar Orlaineta, Damián Ortega, Mario Rangel Faz, Marta Palau, Pipliotti Rist, Vicente Rojo, Jaime Ruiz Otis, SEMEFO, Melanie Smith, Luis Miguel Suro, Pablo Vargas-Lugo.

El reino de Coloso. El lugar del asedio en la época de la imagen
(The Realm of Colossus or the Place of Siege in the Age of the Image)


This exhibition, curated by José Luis Barrios, considers the relationship between violence and technology in the 20th century, seeking to register the concept of terror in the aesthetics of warfare. By centering on the technologies of the gaze as defined by modernity and late modernity: photography, film and electronic art, the exhibition brings together a concise selection of iconographic material from international photojournalism, fragments of documentary films, and site-specific works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Oscar Muñoz.

Cantos Cívicos: A NILC project in collaboration with Miguel Ventura 

This installation, originally produced by the artist in collaboration with Spanish curator Juan de Nieves for the Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló in Valencia, Spain, is a project that underscores the ironic parallels between human and animal societies, while unmasking the conflicts of territory and identity in our contemporary age. In this interdisciplinary installation, which includes a rat laboratory, NILC (the New Interterritorial Language Committee) operates in collaboration with scholars from the UNAM's departments of psychology, veterinary science and biology, and with the choirs of the UNAM's National School of Music.

Las líneas de la mano
(The Lines of the Hand) 


Curator Jimena Acosta brings together the work of artists from different regions that together provide a platform for the examination and investigation of the social, political and aesthetic complexities of contemporary experience. The artists --some using analytical and documentary forms, others adopting abstract or poetic approaches-- unveil the mechanisms of present-day capitalism while subverting the aesthetic canons related to contemporary artistic consumption. 

Artists. Fiona Banner, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Mircea Cantor, Máximo González, Mark Lombardi, Julie Mehretu, Moris, Bruce Nauman, Edgar Orlaineta, Diego Pérez, Aida Ruilova, Tom Sachs, Santiago Sierra.

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