There is no other exhibition in Mexico quite like the chameleonic Bienal FEMSA. Unlike most biennials, which take place in the same city every other year, each edition of the Bienal FEMSA is staged in a new state, meaning that the venues and sites change constantly. Local history museums, university galleries, artist-run spaces, and public squares are the sorts of locations that have hosted the event; climate-controlled white cubes have been rare.
This year’s FEMSA continues that trend. The 15th edition, in the state of Guanajato, is split across two cities: the eponymous state capital, a picturesque former mining town, and León, the region’s trade center, well-known for its tanning businesses and robust industrial sector. Managing the biennial in just one city would be tricky enough; stretching it across two places is a flex.
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The two-city model comes with logistical problems. Unexpected closures and technical issues at certain venues impede this edition, rendering high-quality art unseeable at times. Has FEMSA, the crown jewel of the Mexican art calendar, become too sprawling? This show seemed to propose that there are limits to its curatorial ambitions.
The Bienal FEMSA, part of the charitable arm of the ubiquitous bottling company FEMSA, started out more modestly. It began as an open contest in the city of Monterrey, where artists submitted work for judgement by a committee of senior artists, critics and curators. That committee would then choose a few works to be acquired for the company’s art collection, which ballooned quickly.
If the show was once boring and corporate, it gained new life under the directorship of Willy Kautz, who, starting in 2016, began moving the biennial in a less traditional direction. In 2018, he inaugurated the traveling model with a show in Zacatecas. Two years later, an edition in Michoacán followed, only to be closed early by Covid, and reopened a year later. (The 2022 edition was postponed altogether.)
Mariana Munguía, the current artistic director, said of the biennial, “I think of it more as a program,” a measure of how the biennial has shifted away from merely exhibiting art under the company’s name, toward a curatorially driven show that constitutes more than the exhibition itself. This year’s edition, opened in May, also includes a zine and book fair, a traveling film program, and live performances.
In a country where the federal government has typically done much of the heavy lifting to support the arts, the Bienal FEMSA’s approach is a much-needed alternative to the canned prizes and contest exhibitions of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL). In Munguía’s words, “It’s been a virtue to be able to adapt to the needs of the cultural scene in Mexico.”
Precisely because the program seeks to redirect the art scene’s focus away from the country’s traditional art centers, none of the venues are likely to be on the radar of the international art world.
In León, at the Museum of Art and History of Guanajuato (MAHG), rising star Miriam Salado is showing the astonishing kinetic sculpture Detonaciones (Discharges, 2024). Lit like a totem, this horned, fringed, leather-clad metal column twists violently back and forth on its axis, making a thunderous rattle. At first glance, I mistook the adornments on the fringe for beads or shells, like those worn on the ankles during ritual dances by several Indigenous groups in Mexico. A heartbeat later, I realized they were in fact empty bullet cases, and that the racket they made as the centrifugal force slammed them into each other was a gesture not only toward the tumult and confusion of gun violence, but also its horrifying ritualization in Mexican society. I can’t think of a comparable work on the topic realized in as sobering a manner as this sculpture.
Galería Jesús Gallardo, a downtown municipal gallery that’s a short drive away, is showing the latest work by Miguel Fernández de Castro, another artist exploring the topic of violence with a focus on the US-Mexico border. Shot in desolate territory, Los bárbaros (The Barbarians, 2024) is a two-channel video installation about the ambivalence between fact and fiction on camera. It’s best to go in without knowing too much, but the most unsettling part of the video essentially replicates, in Spanish, a shot-for-shot scene of Native American scouts employed by US Customs and Border Protection looking for traces of drug smugglers along the border. The graininess of the English-language footage contrasts with the high definition of the Spanish version, but otherwise, the scenes are eerily similar. Teasing apart the original from its replica is complicated further by parts of the video that throw doubt on the camera’s sense of objectivity. Los bárbaros is a razor-sharp critique not only of how authorities respond to violent events—which have become sadly unexceptional along the border—but also of the implicit trust placed in the moving image when used to document such incidents.
If Galería Jesús Gallardo and the Museum of Art and History of Guanajato represent conventional exhibition spaces, another unmissable venue, Torre Andrade, epitomizes León’s underground art scene. An independently run exhibition space in an abandoned building’s car park, Torre Andrade’s graffitied facade is currently host to wheat-pasted drawings of unnervingly anthropomorphized orchids and grinning, bewigged skulls by Javier Barrios, from his series “Buddhist Visions of Hell”(2021). The unfinished concrete walls and rudimentary furnishings make Torre Andrade a perfect venue for the travelling film and live performance program, which tends toward the unconventional.
Unlike the venues in León, which are dedicated arts spaces, the two main sites in the capital are history museums. The Alhóndiga de Granaditas, a late 18th-century grain storehouse that played an important if gruesome role during the Mexican War of Independence, is managed by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). On view is Nestor Jiménez’s whimsical interactive sculpture Totentanz (Dance of Death, 2024), which illustrates a recurring theme in many works across the biennial: the persistence of the macabre in Mexican art. Six upright, life-size wooden marionettes, joined together at the hands with bamboo poles to form a sinister conga line, jump into the dance of death whenever an audience member takes the lead and uses the poles to set a stiff choreography. Facing the lifeless marionettes is the painting La muerte arquera (Death with Bow and Arrow, 2024), a towering replica of a common symbol of death in New Spanish Baroque: a skeleton with a scythe, bow, and quiver.
A few doors down from Diego Rivera’s childhood home, the Museum of the People of Guanajuato’s second-floor galleries follow a predetermined route set by the museum’s administrators, which acts as an unintended Mexican Art History crash course. Contemporary works share the narrow spaces of the building’s colonial architecture with 19th-century portraits, religious ex-voto paintings, and nationalist murals by José Chávez Morado—inside a chapel, no less. It’s a wonderfully eclectic hodgepodge of Mexican visual culture, and perhaps the hardest space to curate. Amid it all, video art shines: Daniel Godínez Nivón’s El sueño del oyamel (The Sacred Fir’s Dream, 2024) was shot with the Indigenous Otomí-speaking community of San Ildefonso Cieneguilla, Guanajuato, and documents the beauty of what often appears like inhospitable terrain. It’s also one of the few works that speaks directly to the biennial’s official title, “The Voice in the Mountain.”
For its 15th edition, Bienal FEMSA set ambitious goals, many of which were realized through outstanding artworks and public programming. Logistically, however, Bienal FEMSA is not yet a well-oiled machine: unannounced closures by the INAH and municipal authorities have occurred at many sites, and mechanical issues with the kinetic artworks are pervasive. If the biennial truly intends to bolster the arts outside Mexico’s large urban centers, the next edition must find a way to coordinate with sites effectively and make sure they remain reliably open and accessible to visitors traveling expressly to see the show.
As it stands, some venues, like the Alhóndiga, clearly do not feel ownership over the project, and will close to visitors on a whim to accommodate their own organization’s needs. Some even occasionally lack manpower, relying on interns to stay open. FEMSA’s massive localized network should be able to leverage its prominence in favor of the biennial without much difficulty, an advantage the artistic team could lean on in future editions. Here’s to hoping that the lessons learned in Guanajuato will, in two years’ time, foster something even better.