Taiwanese and Mexican artists will come together for a joint art exhibition in southern Mexico City in an attempt to answer such questions as "Is the material more valuable than ideas?" and "Is society more important than culture?"
"Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives" places emphasis on elaborating humankind's understanding of power by predicting its distribution within different networks. Focusing on how contemporariness reinvents its own language through exchange and how it illustrates the aesthetics of calculation, this joint exhibition depicts a broad landscape of economics in its fundamental definition.
The seven featured acts are Huang Po-chih (黃博志), Hou I-ting (侯怡亭), and Yu Cheng-ta (余政達) from Taiwan; and Mexico-based artists Chantal Penalosa, Valentina Jager, Modoka Furuhashi, and MOTOS NINJA (a collective comprising Nicolas Poggi, Ricardo R. Rojas, and Ana G. Zambrano).
Encompassing research, collective creation, and the human body, the works of these artists employ layered forms of values-in-exchange with a social-political criticality. In looking at how art is made, ideas of production emerge as a crucial theme.
"Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives" sets up a context that juxtaposes (un)measurable values and the (im)material with the everyday currency of labor, time, desire, power, and language to shed light on the tangible meaning of exchange.
Curator Jo Ying Peng (彭若瑩), who is currently based in Mexico City to manage arts space Vernacular Institute, proposes a shift in how and what is seen as the currency of collections, from material to symbolic value. This questioning will be enacted in the works through performance, video, installation, and text, she added.
The Taiwan-Mexico joint exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture's Grants for Cultural Exchanges and Collaborative Projects with Personnel between Taiwan and Latin America, which seeks to foster closer ties between Taiwan and 33 Latin American and Caribbean nations through the arts.
‘Narratives of Exchange / Exchange of Narratives’