Exhibition

-> May 16 – May 17

The Museo Amparo presents the exhibition Una vuelta en espiral. 35 años Colección Museo Amparo, curated by Pamela Desjardins.

The Museo Amparo houses in its collection pieces from various time periods and materialities: pre-Hispanic, viceregal, nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary. This exhibition takes as its starting point the spiral, which throughout history has been associated with the structure of the cosmos, the cycles of life and death, and the connection between earth, sky, and the underworld. From this idea, a layered and non-linear reading is constructed about the institution's memory and the configuration of its Collection.

Una vuelta en espiral traces the Museum's past as the home of the family that initiated the collection in Puebla. It pays attention to works and objects that had remained in the vault for a long time, in some cases due to their more popular or artisanal nature, their anonymity, or because they stood at the margins of canonical narratives. These pieces enter into dialogue with key works from the Collection and with three new commissions by artists Alejandra Venegas, Dulce Chacón, and Tahanny Lee Betancourt, which in turn allude to pieces from the collection through a technique recurrent in New Spain, an unusual object, or images originating from other territories, respectively.

The itinerary is also structured as a spiral. It begins with a display case that is a kind of inner core of the institution, then continues with various approaches to the notion of the intimate through the body and the home, then opens up to nature and distant lands, only to return to a room where audiovisual material from the institutional archive is projected. In an archaeological manner, the works, objects, and documentary material on display reveal the richness of this collection, which bears witness to paradigm shifts and transformations in ways of life, beliefs, technical advances, and forms of representing the territory that houses it.

—Museo Amparo