What to See During Mexico City’s Art Week 2025

Paloma Contreras Lomas and Carolina Fusilier | Museo Anahuacalli | 4 February – 8 June

Paloma Contreras Lomas and Carolina Fusilier’s dual exhibition is staged in one of Mexico City’s most enigmatic spaces. Diego Rivera built the volcanic monolith as a future mausoleum for himself and as a temple for his impressive, if dubious, collection of pre-Hispanic art. In the end he was buried in the Panteón Dolores, but Fusilier and Contreras Lomas respond to the site’s phantasmagorical imagination through a constellation of sculptures, sound works and paintings that draw from – and reanimate – the cast of spectres embedded within the museum-cum-monument-cum-crypt. Contreras Lomas’s sculptures, like much of her work, are rife with violent, gleeful and urgent symbols. Her cast of Mesoamerican creatures, here drawing from the museum’s collection as much as from Latin American sci-fi and B-horror films, propose a Mesoamerican futurism cut short by Western modernity, while Fusilier’s paintings translate the mysticism around Diego Rivera and Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov’s theories of immortality into abstracted metal tubes and mechanical gear that metamorphosize into cosmic streaks of liquid, light and smoke.

Haegue Yang | Kurimanzutto | 8 February – 5 April

Though best known for her kinetic sculptures and installations, Haegue Yang’s gorgeous flat works have rightly garnered a flurry of attention recently. Her ‘Mesmerizing Mesh’ (2021–ongoing) series of cut and folded collages feature intricate abstract compositions made of mulberry paper that interweave traditional paper-cutting techniques from Mexican, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Punjabi and Hmong cultures. Some works from this series have been exhibited in the past, but they acquire a new sense of poetry in Mexico, with its extensive history of decorative papel picado. New pieces made for the show include Mexican-crafted interpretations of the Japanese sacred straw rope shimenawa, and the Slavic pagan harvest celebratory object didukh, here reimaged using natural fibres woven by Mexican craftsmen in the state of Michoacán. Most of the two-dimensional works are suspended from the ceiling on hanging wooden displays, while her ‘Mesmerizing Votive Pagoda Lanterns’ (2024) – ornate sculptures adorned with paper flowers and purple light – hypnotically rotate in space.

Sara Eliassen | Laboratorio Arte Alameda | 31 October 2024 – 16 February 2025

September 2024 marked a decade since the disappearance of 43 college students from Ayotzinapa, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. As the case continues to so heavily weigh on the collective imagination, unresolved and with multiple state-endorsed contradictory narratives, Sara Eliassen’s fantastic ‘Images [And How to Answer Them]’ meditates on the power and limitations of images as meaning-making tools in today’s digital age. Her eponymous filmic essay unfolds across seven channels, each featuring interviews with witnesses and key interlocutors working in journalism, art, activism and philosophy. We see evidentiary footage of fearmongering, state-sanctioned violence and its distorted representations, and, finally, an assembly at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Tlatelolco Tower, where the many featured voices physically come together to plot an alternative to the official histories established by the government. Eliassen’s matrix of images, sounds and voices shows how ‘truth’ is necessarily multivocal and made collectively.

David Medalla | Museo Tamayo | 14 November 2024 – 30 March 2025

The first comprehensive survey dedicated to the wonderfully eclectic late Filipino artist David Medalla opens with a sculpture of phallic tubular forms that ooze shape-shifting mounds of foam. From these experiments with kinetic art in the 1960s to collaborative ventures in performance, activism and participatory art, Medalla’s work was always engaged in impermanence, change and anti-institutionalism. These commitments present challenges to the curator of a retrospective, but the Tamayo show (traveling from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles) successfully shows that the true core – magic, even – of Medalla’s practice lies precisely in its embrace of ephemerality. The winding collection of paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs and archival materials on view are surely but a fragment of all that he produced throughout his career, and it is this sense of incompletion that produces such a compelling portrait of an artist for whom art – made with and about friends, lovers and strangers – was inseparable from life.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo | PEANA | 3 February – 29 March

In the mythical underworlds of Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s ‘Tzitzimime’ (2021–23) video trilogy, vermin, scavengers and rejected entities of modernity in low-fi costumes inhabit a Mexico ravaged by myriad forms of violence and escalating militarization. Her solo exhibition at PEANA marks the Mexico City premiere of Eclipse (2023), the latest work in the series. The film opens with a headless figure marching to a military cadence. A group of Itzpapálotl, mythological Aztec butterflies with ‘razor-sharp wings’, emerge from their chrysalises to find themselves in a threatened landscape. Collectively, the butterflies conjure the presence of a bloodthirsty turkey sorceress who sheds her human legs in a dancing ritual of purple haze evocative of contemporary protests against femicide and female violence. She proceeds to devour the headless figure in an act of revenge and retribution. Rincón Gallardo proffers an optimistic worldview where bastardized Mesoamerican creatures might serve as purifiers, healers and restorers of a world order gone awry.

Cristóbal Gracia | Pequod Co. | 3 February – 29 March

Cristóbal Gracia is best known as a former member of Bikini Wax EPS, the multidisciplinary collective behind sa la na, a yuum, iasis/ laissez faire-laissez passer (2020), an allegory for Mexico’s problematic neoliberalization told through a massive sculpture of a whale carcass, the infamous Keiko, filled with urban detritus. Gracia’s solo show at Pequod Co. reflects his continued interest in material excess and the digressive, synchronous and amorphous relationships between objects and symbols. The term ‘baroque’ comes from the Portuguese barroco, which means an irregular, or imperfectly shaped, pearl. In line with a long Latin American tradition, Gracia understands the baroque as a stage of simultaneous, conflicting narratives of modernity. The centrepiece of the show is a monstrous human-size pearl cast in plaster and covered in fragments of crushed objects. Perched on a plastic fruit crate, Baroque cultured pearl, “the Adam” (2024), inserts plaster’s winding history within Western art into a uniquely Mexican baroqueness, positing hybridity, and even failure, as a productive means of production.

_{Main image: Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Eclipse, 2023, video still. Courtesy: the artist and PEANA; photograph: Claudia López Terroso}