12.MAR. - 20.MAR.2022
Upside Down Earth

As part of the Páayt’aan Festival in Izamal, the Museo Jumex presents a special offsite project involving five artists based in different regions of Mexico who have been invited to make new work in relation to the town and its surroundings. Presented in an abandoned cinema in the center of Izamal, each artist responds to aspects of the local culture, from the overlaying of ancient and contemporary ruins to materials and traditions. Their projects have developed over different times scales, each with a performance element. The exhibition presents both traces of past actions and ongoing processes of production.

Upside Down Earth references a key work by the American artist Robert Smithson from the Colección Jumex. Upside Down Tree III (1969) was produced as part of a body of work and related article for the international magazine Artforum “Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan”. The photograph is the only register of an action where the artist upended a small tree, burying its branches in the ground and exposing its roots. The related text weaves together this and other actions in the landscape through relationship to modern tourism and ancient myth. The artists in Upside Down Earth each forge similarly complex relationships that reverse or invert the usual relationships between past and present, as well as real and imaginary landscapes.

Artists: Lorena Ancona, Galia Eibenschutz & Erika Torres, Cristina Ochoa, Calixto Ramirez, Rafiki Sanchez

La Tierra al revés: Galia Eibenschutz

Organized by Kit Hammonds, Chief Curator, Museo Jumex; and Camila Melo, Curator of Contemporary Art, Páayt’aan Festival. With thanks to the Páayt’aan Festival and Fundación Transformación, Arte y Educación (TAE).

Foto: Calixto Ramírez