MUSEO JUMEX TURNS 20 YEARS AND PRESENTS NORMAL EXCEPTIONS: CONTEMPORARY ART IN MEXICO

The title of the exhibition comes from a concept of microhistory, a discipline that studies what life was like at a certain time. In counterpoint to traditional historical accounts that offer a panoramic vision, microhistory offers narratives around a single event or person, normal and at the same time exceptional, which reflects the experience of the social conditions of the moment. Normal Exceptions does not follow the methodology of microhistory, but does adopt some of its objectives and principles.

This exhibition focuses on individuals rather than global movements, and includes ignored practices, or inadvertent areas of practice of established artists, which have been important but peripheral to the major critical and artistic debates in art history. The works focus on the presence of the individual human being and his actions within the systems of authority and officiality. Each of them tells an individual story that presents a point of questioning the general lines of the story.

The exhibition is organized according to 6 nuclei:

Portraits gathers artists that have engaged with what has been considered an outlying practice in contemporary art, yet increasingly part of daily life.

Excavations includes artists that reveal material manifestations of time and history marked in particular objects and actions.

Transformations looks at how such objects may become traces of events and people.

These 3 sections consider how common activities, materials, and objects have come to represent what is lost and how it may be recuperated. Through their actions, the artists unsettle the established relationships between individuals and authorities.

Normal Exceptions continues with works by artists who work with the recording devices in which history and memory are inscribed. These encounters take place in diverse landscapes, sometimes unexpected. One of the sections explores the Markets as places of formal and informal exchange. Artists' Interventions in public spaces interrupt daily life. Coins, receipts, and market stall waste act as markers for individual transactions and residuals. Registries shows how artists examine and renew archaic technologies such as vinyl records and obsolete electronic media, as well as museums and other archives: the repositories of memory at different times, which progressively fall into obsolescence in everyday life. In each case, the artists respond to specific incidents that have been made invisible in official records.

Jorge Satorre: Los negros is the first of two solo exhibitions in gallery -1 as part of Normal Exceptions. The installation reunites a number of Satorre’s chapters in Los negros for the first time in Mexico in a display that unearths hidden elements in the gallery and museum itself.