2016 exhibitions

Superpowers of Ten: an Alternative Version of Powers of Ten by Charles & Ray Eames
February 11–March 10
Level 1 gallery

Organized by: José Esparza, Associate Curator, and Viridiana Zavala, Curatorial Assistant

Superpowers of Ten is an alternative version of Powers of Ten, a film created by the office of Charles and Ray Eames for IBM in 1977. Superpowers of Ten deals with the parallel and untold narratives that inform aspects of the film, constructed around themes such as photography and ideology, genetic manipulation and gender issues, among many others. Conceived by architect Andrés Jaque and his Office for Political Innovation Superpowers of Ten will unfold over the space of four weeks, as a documentary and process-based exhibition with a strong workshop component in which the public will be invited to participate in the making of props for a theatrical piece to be staged on March 4, 5, 6 and 7 at the museum.


The Natural Order of Things
March 10–May 8
Level 2 and level 3 galleries

Organized by: Julieta González, Chief Curator and Interim Director, José Esparza, Associate Curator, and Ixel Rion, Curatorial Assistant

This exhibition of works from the Jumex Collection presents some of the key aspects of the museum’s program in the years to come and its particular approach to contemporary art as one that reflects artists’ desire to seek fields of agency outside the art-historical canon and the institutional-gallery framework. It will also offer the public an insight on the different approaches the museum and its curatorial program will take with regard to the collection, and how this resource can generate different curatorial formats and ways of working over the next years. Taking free inspiration from literary sources and artist museums, the works from the collection are presented in the framework of a fictional museum, organized in taxonomic divisions, orders, that simultaneously support but also interrogate this classificatory regime. A selected number of artists have been invited to dialogue with the different categories, amongst them Melanie Gilligan, Coco Fusco, and the artist collectives HCRH and Dexter Sinister, who will design the fictional museum’s graphic identity. The exhibition display is designed by the architecture and design collaborative Pedro&Juana.


Matthew Barney: Cremaster Cycle/River of Fundament
Cremaster Cycle, March 15–20 at Museo Jumex;  Level 1 gallery
River of Fundament, March 19, 4pm, at Palacio de Bellas Artes

Organized by: Rosario Nadal, Deputy Director, and Ixel Rion, Curatorial Assistant

Museo Jumex in collaboration with Secretaría de Cultura (Mexico’s Ministry of Culture), will present the Mexican premier of River of Fundament, a film by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler. Leading up to the premiere, Barney’s five-part film Cremaster Cycle will be on view at Museo Jumex.


Carla Fernández: The Barefoot Designer: A workshop to Unlearn
March 23–May 15
Level 1 gallery

Coordinated by: Viridiana Zavala, Curatorial Assistant

The Barefoot Designer, a variation on the exhibition originally presented at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2014, features the work and design philosophy of Mexican fashion designer Carla Fernández, through her exploration of the traditions and techniques of the different indigenous cultures of Mexico. Audiences will be introduced the designer’s techniques as well as to the indigenous communities’  ancestral forms of knowledge through the process-based and workshop components of the exhibition. Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener will stage a performance in the context of the exhibition.


Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better
June 9–September 4
Level 1, level 2 and level 3 galleries

Organized by: Nancy Spector and Nat Trotman (Guggenheim Museum)
Coordinated at Museo Jumex by Gabriel Villalobos, Curatorial Assistant

Assembling more than three hundred sculptures, photographs, slide projections, and videos, the exhibition encapsulates and culminates the dynamic collaboration of the artists, bringing into focus the generative and incisive dialogue they sustained over the course of their joint career. Fischli and Weiss pondered questions great and small, sometimes imitating whimsical philosophers and challenging the idea of dualism, a cornerstone of Western thought. Everything the artists produced playfully unravels what they understood to be “popular opposites”—labor versus leisure, fiction versus reality, kitsch versus beauty, and the banal versus the sublime, among others.


Walid Raad
October 13, 2016–January 14, 2017
Level 3 gallery

Organized by: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Curated by: Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Coordinated at Museo Jumex by Ixel Rion, Curatorial Assistant

Following the presentation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the exhibition will travel to Museo Jumex. 

Walid Raad has explored how documentary, memory, narrative, and fiction are shaped by the experience of violence in one of his long-term projects, The Atlas Group (1989–2004). His current ongoing project, Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing), examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructure for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of performance, narrative, and storytelling in Raad’s oeuvre. 


General Idea
October 27, 2016–February 11, 2017
Level 2 gallery

Organized by: Agustín Pérez Rubio, Artistic Director of Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA)
Coordinated at Museo Jumex, by Gabriel Villalobos, Curatorial Assistant

Museo Jumex in collaboration with MALBA/Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, will present an exhibition of Canadian collective General Idea (active between 1969 and 1994). The exhibition will present work in various media including paintings, sculptures, installations, multi-media projects, drawings, and collages.