Visual Bipolarity
Visual Bipolarity, presented at Museo del Estanquillo in Mexico City, offers a critical re-reading of over four decades of collaborative practice by Los Siamés (Marisa Lara and Arturo Guerrero). Bringing together nearly 300 works across painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, installation, photography, and performance, the exhibition examines their method of co-creation as a challenge to individual authorship and cultural hierarchies. Situated between popular culture and institutional art, their work engages urban memory, ritual, and embodied experience as forms of knowledge production. Through a sustained dialogue with the archive and legacy of Carlos Monsiváis, Visual Bipolarity positions artistic practice as a site where collective identity, cultural resistance, and aesthetic experimentation intersect.
Ghosts Always Come Back
At Kunstmuseum Basel, Ghosts / Geister: Visualizing the Supernatural, curated by Eva Reifert, unfolds as a charged encounter between visibility and the unseen. In her review, Nekane Aramburu traces how artists from Georgiana Houghton and Frederick Hudson to Mike Kelley, Katharina Fritsch, Rachel Whiteread, Claudia Casarino, Ryan Gander, and Gillian Wearing mobilize the ghost not as metaphor, but as a persistent visual and material force. Moving between 19th-century spiritualism and contemporary practices, the exhibition destabilizes the boundaries of abstraction, embodiment, and perception, revealing how the spectral continues to haunt the languages of modern and contemporary art.
The Politics of the Object in Michele Pred’s Work
Projecting Democracy: Michele Pred and the Feminist Politics of the Object — Essay by Yohanna Magdalene Roa for INES_Magazina on Michele Pred’s exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery. The article examines how Pred uses everyday objects—vintage purses, quilts, confiscated airport items, and architectural projections—to address feminism, human rights, bodily autonomy, and the intersection of domestic space and political power in contemporary art.
Subverting Time: Gestures of Friction within the Chronological Container
This essay examines Subverted Times: Interferences in the Museum’s Space/Time, an exhibition at the Museo de América in Madrid featuring interventions by Silvia Ramírez Monroy, Pablo Zamorano Azóca, Fabio Manosalva, Claudia Claremi, Ugo Martínez Lázaro, Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, Ariel Sosa Urquía, Luisa Ordóñez, Glenda Zapata, and Lorena Tabares Salamanca. Through performance, installation, and archival practices, the artists challenge the linear temporal regimes and colonial narratives embedded in the ethnographic museum, proposing alternative understandings of time, memory, and historical continuity.
Insight: Emily Blair Quinn at 5-50 Gallery NYC
This review examines Emily Blair Quinn’s exhibition at 5-50 Gallery, focusing on her paintings, resin sculptures, and photographs that reinterpret vintage porcelain figurines through a contemporary feminist lens. Drawing on Gilded Age aesthetics and themes of gender norms, beauty standards, and female subjectivity, Quinn transforms decorative statuary into psychologically charged narratives. The exhibition critiques historical and contemporary constructions of femininity, including the impact of social media and AI-driven beauty culture, presenting a cohesive body of work grounded in feminist aesthetics and material experimentation.
Whispers on the Horizon: The 14th Taipei Biennial
Whispers on the Horizon: The 14th Taipei Biennial examines how the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s latest biennial navigates the tension between international visibility and local cultural specificity. Framed around the concept of “yearning”—defined as migration, identity, memory, and futurity—the exhibition reveals both the strengths and limitations of its curatorial structure. Through close analysis of works by Shiy De-Jinn, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Skyler Chen, and Ni Hao, the essay interrogates how the Biennial negotiates Taiwan’s geopolitical positioning within global contemporary art. While visually compelling and institutionally ambitious, the 14th Taipei Biennial ultimately exposes the unresolved friction between global validation and self-definition.
Woody Allen, Diomedes Díaz and Pablo Escobar: Culture, Masculinity and Catalytic Figures in Contemporary Society
Daniel Santiago explores popular culture, masculinity, controversy and eccentric characters through figures like Woody Allen, Diomedes Díaz and Pablo Escobar, in a critical and queer-informed cultural reflection.
Work planner by Ana Victoria Jiménez: Archive, Care Labor, and the Politics of Time
An in-depth review of Cuaderno de tareas / Work planner by Ana Victoria Jiménez, Yohanna M Roa exploring feminist archives, domestic labor, performative book design, and the politics of care. Published in INES Magazina.
The Naughty Rebellion
A critical essay on Mia Westerlund Roosen’s exhibition at Nunu Fine Art, New York, reading sculpture through flesh, materiality, dance, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero sueño.
Jeanne Jaffe: Becoming Hybrid, Emilio Martinez: Freedom From Fear. At L’Space
Art critic Dominick Lombardi explores the compelling dialogue between Jeanne Jaffe and Emilio Martinez at L’Space, where hybrid bodies, faith, migration, humor, and resistance converge into two distinct yet deeply connected artistic worlds.