To crackle is to produce a fine rupture, to produce a subtle break that changes a surface’s appearance. It is a gesture that disrupts.
This is the intention of the curatorship of the XIX Photography Biennial, presented at the Image Center. With 25 selected works, the curatorial discourse by the cultural manager, writer, and curator Lorena Peña Brito, proposes to crackle the bias existing in photographic exhibitions and to be a contemporary approach to image production in Mexico.
Through three parallel readings that seek to break away from a traditional interpretation of the Biennial (The veil and the ghost, Networks, Knots and Convulsive Territorialities), the works address different points of a convulsive social spectrum and propose to reflect on aspects as complex and varied as the struggles for rights, dissidence, intimacy, miscegenation, pandemics or memory. At the same time, it invites us to think about the crossings of photography as an act that is intersected by technologies that have modified, for many years, the way in which an image is produced.
The veil and the ghost
From the idea of concealment and the error that makes an image disappear when it is veiled, a symbolic veil that barely allows us to see the discourse is proposed. With liminal works between the photographic, the sculptural and the architectural, a dialogue is opened on the digital and symbolic filters that modify an image and our approach to it.
Alma Camelia. The quota, 2020. A record of commercial curtains on family businesses in Tecámac that closed due to extortion or disenchantment. Photographs with an Instagram filter treatment that turn them into ghostly vestiges.
Roberto Tondopó. From an installation In the Glorious Name of St. Sebastian Perizonium of the body of pain, 2021. Part of a documentation on the Chuntá, men dressed as women who dance to San Sebastian during the January celebration in Chiapas.
Rogelio Séptimo. Umbrales, 2020.
Pavka Segura. Pangolin City (Releases and Views) I, 2020. The author intervenes the space he inhabits with sculptural exercises from perishable materials, a project that originally was to be developed in public spaces but changed its output as a result of the pandemic.
Nets. Knots
Photography is a solitary act. How can an image be a vehicle to talk about collectivity, in a context that has raised, more than ever, the need to create bonds from affection in order to continue walking together? Networks. Knots welcomes the work of authors who collaborate with communities through active listening or who share their authorship in order to listen to what lx otrx, or what their own life stories, have to say.
Alex Cabrera. Thinking of you, 2020. A sequence of self-portraits of the author crying, in reference to his father, confronting the cultural odes of a macho country in which “men don’t cry”.
Sandra Hordoñez. Uprising roads, 2021. Documentation that the author has done in over five years around feminist protests.
Saraí Ojeda. What silence hides (2020). Polyptych of the documentation made by the author with women from the Sierra de Zongolica and the Sierra Negra of Puebla, where they shared different stories of violence faced by the communities.
Diego Moreno. Series malignant influences, 2020-. Intervention that the artist has made to images of his family archive, born out of his fascination with the anomalous and the monstrous.
Luis Enrique Pérez. The richness of my blood, 2021. From his personal and family history, Luis Enrique reflects on racism and cultural syncretism.
Convulsive territories
“Convulsed Territorialities refers to a time in which notions of future, certainty, privilege, territory and country are convulsed”. What is territory and how do we inhabit it? Who has the right to move? What is the journey from confinement?
Luis Antonio Rojas. Voice notes from Tijuana, 2019. The documentation he made about the migrant caravan in Tapachula and Tijuana, where he shared his cell phone so that members could make calls or send voice messages. The piece is accompanied by the migrant’s audios, shared with their consent.
Emiliano Aivar. The gran vía, 2020. Large format camera photos that record life in one of the main avenues of the city: Tlalpan.
Onnis Luque. Undercover, 2021. An essay on the uncertainty associated with corruption in the real estate market.
Ernesto Ramirez. 301- Living HERE, 2020. Projection of 31 photographs that Ernesto took from one of the windows of his house during confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Participating in the exhibition of the XIX Biennial of Photography are:
This Biennial seeks to open a dialogue on the way in which the image is produced, the social aspects that go through it and the channels through which it is disseminated. This Biennial seeks to be a question.
The XIX Biennial of Photography will be at the Image Center until March 27, 2022.
