Yani Pecanins

The Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), through the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (MACG), present the exhibition Yani Pecanins. Las cosas sencillas (The Simple Things), along with the project To Open, or Not, a Drawer. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the career of Yani Pecanins (1957–2019), an editor and cultural producer recognized for her sensitive approach to the archive, the written word, and everyday objects.

Spanning more than four decades of artistic production, the exhibition unfolds as an affective journey through the relationships, exiles, and personal and collective memories that shape her work. Artist books, installations, altered objects, photographs, correspondence, and previously unseen pieces illustrate her ability to make art an intimate, political act deeply rooted in writing and independent publishing.

The Simple Things is built around three main themes — the house, the archive, and the book — which function not only as physical and conceptual spaces but also as ways of building community. Her kitchen in the Condesa neighborhood, for example, was for years a meeting point for artists, editors, and thinkers; this domestic space is reimagined in the exhibition as a living installation that embodies the forms of care and complicity that sustained Pecanins’ practice.

The exhibition brings together works from the artist’s personal archive as well as public and private collections. It explores key moments in her trajectory, such as her work with Cocina Ediciones and the collective project El Archivero, while also highlighting her experimentation with unconventional formats, like writing on shoes or creating book-objects from recycled materials.

More than a retrospective, The Simple Things proposes a collective and open-ended reading of Yani Pecanins’ work, emphasizing her embrace of the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the handmade as forms of resistance to dominant narratives in art and history. Rather than a chronological account, the exhibition invites viewers to inhabit the folds, silences, and repetitions that run through her work.

The project To Open, or Not, a Drawer invites visitors to explore Yani Pecanins’ creative universe through free associations between publications, objects, works, and artists. Through personal connections, the public can reconstruct an imaginary around her practice. Key influences on Pecanins’ work serve as starting points: the use of everyday objects as vessels of memory (Alan Glass), the artist book as an expanded form (Ulises Carrión), and the journey as a conceptual thread imbued with nostalgia and encounter. The project also enters into dialogue with works by artists of other generations — such as shared recipes on plates by Guillermo Valero — as well as with references from curator Luis A. Orozco himself, including the visual poetry of Joan Brossa and Bartolomé Ferrando, forming a tapestry of cross-generational affinities.

— MACG