N.A.S.A.L. is pleased to present Crítica a la Pirámide by Wendy Cabrera Rubio for her first solo-show in our Mexico City space.
“This exhibition contains a premonitory dream, perhaps one that someone had in the 1960s following the designation of the host city for the Games of the XIX Olympiad. Like any dream, it is populated by damaged things: words running in circles, cardboard faces, improbable rooms, interrupted conversations. Yet, because it is a prophetic dream, all this debris ultimately comes together to reveal what is truly being dreamed, which is, of course, monstrous. In this true dream, three overlapping realms arise. The first shines so brightly it hurts the eyes and names itself a prosperous utopia to be consecrated when the Games are held. The second, lugubrious, consists of the human machinery of modernization that builds and sustains this supposed prosperity. The third is called Tlatelolco.
This exhibition also contains two characters dreaming one another: a court architect and a foreign artist. The first, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, is a dignitary in the service of the nation, at times alongside the government, at others alongside Big Capital. He works not only in the prose of schools, markets, and stadiums, but also in poetry: within the forest of the future host city he erects beautiful altars to the modern State, using the pristine forms demanded by modernity—a descending spiral for the Gallery of History, a cell for the Museum of Modern Art, the quadrangle of a ceremonial center for the Museum of Anthropology. The second, Mathias Goeritz, bursts theatrically onto the scene mid-century as a kind of conjurer of the new: he stages exhibitions, weaves networks, establishes a seductive dialectical pedagogy, and plants a spiritual and emotional proposal against the apocalyptic clamor of contemporary art.(…)”
Exhibition text by Daniel Escoto