Through Oct. 21, 2012, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Mexico’s Monterrey will be presenting the tenth edition of the FEMSA Biennial, a competitive meeting aimed at encouraging and promoting the visual arts in that country.
For the celebration of this special anniversary edition, event planners have devised an embracing structure in which spectators could take a view of the winners of the previous (ninth) edition on the one hand, and on the other hand rub elbows with this year’s contestants. At the same time, the exhibition entitled Sextaniqatsi: desorden habitable, curated by Jose Roca, proposes a glimpse of Latin America by the hand of eleven artists from nine countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela. This exhibit reflects on the ties between order and chaos in urban spaces, as well as on informal self-organizing ways that escape the modernist rationale and its own esthetics.
Installations, drawings, sculptures, photography and other expressions are marking a milestone of diversity in this year’s biennial, featuring 83 selected artworks, 9 previous-edition winners and a baker’s dozen guest artists convened by Roca.
The FEMSA Biennial was founded in 1992 and a grand total of 8,640 artists have attended with 21,085 works to date. National and foreign artists (they must have lived at least two years in the country) are invited to present their works. Prizes are doled out in two categories, based on the work formats: bi-dimensional and tridimensional –concepts that make room for a vast array of artistic expressions.
Some world-class Mexican artists, such as Betsabeé Romero, the SEMEFO Group and Rubén Gutiérrez, have grabbed top honors in previous FEMSA editions. This time around the Acquisition Prizes (200,000 Mexican pesos) went to Miguel Fernández (Sonora, Mexico, 1986) and Marianna Dellekamp (Distrito Federal, Mexico, 1968). For each edition, an international jury is selected by the Organizing Committee, in charge of assessing the projects and giving out the prizes. In these working teams, experts and artists like José Bedia (Cuba), Olivier Debroise (Mexico), EryCamara (Senegal), Liliana Porter (Argentina), Andrea Giunta (Argentina) and Philippe Louisgrand (France), have been members. The winning works go straight into the FEMSA Collection, in an effort to count on a program of exhibits other than the Biennial’s.
The event’s catalog will be available at the Museum’s store beginning Sept. 2012.
Source: Press release
