MEXICO
Monica Mayer
Reactivation of The Clothesline by Mónica Mayer in the Contemporary Art University Museum, Mexico City, May 2016
A room is filled with a clothesline, pink pieces of paper and pens. Visitors are invited to leave anonymous comments about sexual abuse and harassment.
The pink slips of paper ask questions such as “Have you ever experienced violence or harassment? What happened?” or “As a woman, where do you feel safe?”
According to The Guardian, even though this artwork has traveled extensively through Latin America, it strikes a chord with the amount of violence in the US.
“We tend to think Mexico has a lot of harassment but whenever I do this project in the States, it’s just as bad,” said Mayer. “I’m shocked about the level of violence.”
The goal of this artwork is not only to raise awareness of the problems of harassment against women but to arrive at conclusions to help solve the problem.
Leonora Carrington
“Mujeres Conciencia” is composed by two female figures, one white and one black, and they appear to be exchanging two opposite colored fruits.
In the center of the image stands a serpent whose point of origin is a cross, the lower part of the cross contains the roots of a plant structure that supports the main circle, encompassing the area where the heads of the two women are found and of the serpent.
The symbols in this painting are linked to the Judeo-Christian myth of the expulsion from paradise, but in this painting there is no Adam, but two women exchanging the fruits of the tree of knowledge: mujeres conciencia.
Mujeres Conciencia, Leonora Carrington, 1972.
Julieta Aranda
Two shakes, a tick and a jiffy, Julieta Aranda, 2009.
Two shakes, a tick and a jiffy proposes a temporal experience as a shifting state, liberated from rigid conventions of measurement. The work presents the viewer with an altered, oversize clock in which the day is divided into 10 elongated hours, referencing decimal time, an initiative introduced during the French Revolution that reorganized the day into 10 hours with 100 minutes of 100 seconds. While the clock pays homage to this act, the second hand represents a subjective experience of time, corresponding directly to the artist’s fluctuating heart rate over the course of one day.
The time it takes for the clock to complete a revolution of 100 seconds changes according to Aranda’s behavior and state of mind: it ticks faster during moments of excited activity and slower during periods of rest. The political concept of time is therefore complicated by the personal experience of it.
Lorena Wolffer
One of the most incisive performances that Lorena Wolffer has produced, which inevitably touches the sensibility of Mexicans by getting to the root of some of our darkest social problems is Mientras Dormíamos (el caso Juárez). Lorena used her body to re-create the blows, mutilations, and bullet wounds suffered by fifty women killed in Juárez. With the help of police files, scenery and morgue attire, she marked her body with a surgical marker in each of the places where the 50 women suffered different physical assaults.
The action of marking her body, highlighting the cases of strangulation and rape on her body, draws the viewer's attention to the female body of the victims represented in the body of Lorena. Juarez women are being serially murdered based solely on their gender, there are females losing their lives just because of being women. Lorena's body speaks for those who can no longer speak.
Mientras Dormíamos (el caso Juarez), Lorena Wolffer, 2002.
Remedios Varo
In her works, Remedios Varo sought to transfigure the role of women as an object of male desire. For this reason, in her paintings, women are alchemists, witches, spiritual beings. At the same time, Remedios Varo created alternative worlds, where the imagination fuses pieces of reality generating new forms. Her work has the theoretical influence of Jung, Freud and Adler, as well as different forms of mysticism.