Chantal Peñalosa

The Zapopan Art Museum presents Loom Tales, an exhibition by artist Chantal Peñalosa, curated by Virginia Roy.

In this exhibition, the artist focuses on Chinese migration to Mexico, drawing from the story of her own ancestors and family trauma, as well as the testimony of hegemonic official narratives and the persistence of xenophobic logic. Born in northern Mexico, Peñalosa’s work approaches the border as a space of interstice. Through the poetics of her images, the pieces evoke the wound and fragility of the border territory, and the consequences of migration and exile that the border entails and generates.

Through the depiction of landscapes and the inclusion of floral elements, Peñalosa emphasizes notions of absence and oblivion, pointing to the strangeness that hides within and traverses these places. In this pursuit, the artist establishes correspondences in an attempt to engage in dialogue with different moments as well as with other species.

Chantal Peñalosa is an artist from Baja California, Mexico. Her work takes the geographic tensions of borders—particularly between Mexico and the United States—as a starting point. Her investigations engage with phenomena such as time, waiting, violence, and suspended states, as well as with narratives and spaces that have been relegated to the ghostly realm, left out of official histories. She has presented solo exhibitions at Puget Sound University, Tacoma, Washington (2025); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2024); CEINA, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2021); Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2021); Best Practice, San Diego, California, United States (2021); and has participated in group exhibitions at Americas Society, New York, United States (2024); Fondazione Prada, Venice (2023); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021); M HKA, Antwerp (2019); among others.

Virginia Roy is a researcher and curator. She holds a degree in Art History from the University of Barcelona, and has completed specializations in Art History at the University of Sussex (UK), as well as postgraduate studies at institutions such as the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University. She has given lectures, led curatorial labs, and served on juries at centers and universities in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Argentina, Cuba, and Spain, and has published in various national and international journals. She has been based in Mexico since late 2014. In 2015, she was selected to curate Nomadic Borders for the Biennial of the Borders in Tamaulipas. Since 2016, she has served as Associate Curator at MUAC, where she has curated or co-curated exhibitions by artists such as Laureana Toledo, Yishai Jusidman, Gregor Schneider Kindergarten, Ai Weiwei, Fritzia Irizar, Ana Torfs, Tania Candiani, Francis Alÿs, Gala Porras-Kim, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ursula Biemann, Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, and Magali Lara. She has also co-curated projects in other museums across Mexico, including Memoria Tísica. Edgardo Aragón, MACO, Oaxaca (2017); Simon Gush. Al final del trabajo, Museo Ex Teresa, INBAH (2018); Marcelo Expósito. Primero sueño y tormenta, Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City (2022). Internationally, her curatorial work includes Fritzia Irízar: CaCO₃ at OCMA, Orange County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2019); Desde la herida, selected for Bienalsur at the Kirchner Cultural Center in Buenos Aires (2021); and Marcelo Expósito. Monuments of History and Partially Buried Entropy at the Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires (2024). In 2025, she was invited to co-curate the 17th edition of the Cuenca Biennial, titled The Game.

— Zapopan Art Museum