Ximena Labra

La Clínica presents the exhibition Psíco-arqueología: Delirio colectivo inducido by Ximena Labra, curated Cuauhtémoc Medina.

For nearly a decade and a half, Ximena Labra has incorporated into her practice of critical excitation the task of provoking, diverting, and staging the fantasy of the return of the gods that modern Mexicans are always ready to embody. Beginning with the mass hallucination intervention she carried out at the 2011 Vive Latino festival, Mictlán—where she invited the audience to relive their nightmares of pre-Columbian sacrifice as an extreme identity sport—Labra developed a series of works in which she interrogates the broken symbols of so-called “Mexicanidad.” The defining feature of these works is the ambivalence with which she invites the viewer and participant to be simultaneously inside and outside this officialized mythology, detonating its representations through excess, humor, and carnivalization. This exhibition brings together works in which Labra has practiced an anthropophagy of the archaeological imaginary, including her recent engraved palimpsests based on the controversial book Coloquios y doctrina by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1566), which purportedly transcribes a dialogue between Franciscan friars and Mexican sages as they debated their respective theologies at the moment of the conquest.

— Cuauhtémoc Medina