Shout-Out - Mexico

Reading time: 2 minutes

A
A

30.08.2022

HacerNoche 2022: largest contemporary art festival in Mexico

3 September – 4 December, 2022

For more information:
Hacer Noche
Instagram

The non-profit Mexican arts collective Hacer Noche presents Promised Land, the largest festival of contemporary art in Mexico. Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Hacer Noche 2022 features projects and exhibitions with more than 80 Mexican and international artists, engaging with Oaxaca as an active site for the generation and incubation of potential worlds, communities, and individuals. Taking its title from American music producer and DJ Joe Smooth’s 1987 house music anthem calling for a world of unity and freedom, Promised Land is envisioned as a “project of projects,” all entirely free and open to everyone.

Among the participating institutions and projects: At the former textile mill Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, the Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar recreates his landmark work The Marx Lounge, with a new bibliographic extension around, What to Do. The Oaxacan art collective YOPE Projects opens an exhibition at the Monte Alban archaeological site, preceded by a walk to the site from the center city. From a fallen tree planted during the presidency of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s second president, the U.S. artist Hugh Hayden sculpts the roots of the post-colonial leader of Afro-Mexican descent, who was assassinated in Oaxaca in 1831. Installed in the famed Jardin Etnobotanico de Oaxaca, the 24-meter sculpture shares space with the Mexican artist Ariel Guzik’s concerts for plant sentience, with Laboratorio de Investigación en Resonancia y Expresión de la Naturaleza.

Promised Land also marks the first presentation in Mexico of works by the celebrated Sudanese painters Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq, founder of the Crystalist movement, and Ibrahim El-Salahi, the first African artist to have a retrospective at the Tate Modern, who traveled to Mexico in 1962 and met with Rufino Tamayo. A large public work by the late Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani installed in Oaxaca’s City Hall is an echo of a project the artist was working on when he passed, a reference to spaces inhabited by refugees and exiles. Oaxacan-born artist Berenice Olmedo presents new sculptures in the iconic Templo de Santo Domingo, expanding her bodily exploration of normalcy, marginalization, and rehabilitation presented earlier this year at Kunsthalle Basel. Swedish artist Gabo Camnitzer drives a tuk-tuk through the city center offering rides to children, who will be encouraged to shout from the passenger seat in Tell the City What it Needs to Hear (2022), and Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars presents both a retrospective of printed material and a local pickle bar, among the many open sites for contemplation and discussion in Promised Land.

Taken together, the 2022 Hacer Noche festival, Promised Land, is a rousing consideration of the possible and its mythologies, that artistic director Francisco Berzunza claims is at its core “not about art.” Concurrent with exhibitions and film screenings, Promised Land convenes leading philosophers and advocates including Yásnaya Aguilar and the NGO Somos Agua around symposiums and public readings on water rights, linguistic preservation, and incarceration, and collapses the space between critical approaches, offering new trajectories of the possible.

Comments

There are no coments available.

filter by

Category

Geographic Zone

date