Mariana Hahn

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo y de las culturas oaxaqueñas (MACCO) presents the exhibition "Ojos de Agua" by Mariana Hahn in collaboration with con Goethe Institut México.

The exhibition Ojos de Agua consists of small format drawings made with oil on paper, dreams the artists had, recorded after waking while being in Oaxaca and working on the exhibition, and of sculptures made with bees wax, some of which are filled with water. The artist found a connection between the two while researching local myths. The theme of water has been present in her work for many years now.

Wax and water share a material intelligence: both respond to heat and light through transformation, both exist in states of suspension between solidity and dissolution. When wax melts, it momentarily assumes the appearance of water, capturing light in motion and reflecting its environment as liquid. This reciprocity between materials suggests an ontology of change—matter understood not as fixed, but as continually negotiating form.

In Mixteca and Zapoteca traditions, such transformations articulate a cosmology of interdependence. Ra, the sun, embodies this same cycle. His tear, falling to earth, becomes both water and bee—a condensation of light into substance, of energy into life. The bee, vital to ecological continuity, extends this lineage of transformation from the celestial to the terrestrial.

The wax sculptures in this exhibition materialize these correspondences. Under the sun, their surfaces liquefy into reflective pools; at dusk, they solidify again. Each work renders visible the rhythm of conversion—wax into water, light into matter—an elemental dialogue between heat, reflection, and renewal.

— MACCO