Magazine | Onda MX (English)

Review

Guess Who. On "Broken Column" at the Museo de la Ciudad de México

by Constanza Dozal

Reading time

6 min

In Mexico City we love to play guess who: who is in the latest exhibition, who knows where that bar is, who knows the aunt of the friend of the collector’s brother who can lend you an artwork, who fixed the museum’s infamous air-conditioning system.

Article

y que le digo y que me dice: How Do You Edit an Art Text? Summary of Our Talk #4

by Sandra Sánchez & Josephine Dorr

Reading time

4 min

On January 18, 2026, as part of the public program of Index Art Book Fair at kurimanzutto, Mexico City, the fourth session of y que le digo y que me dice took place, organized by Onda MX. This initiative emerged from the need to open a space for dialogue among artists, writers, and other thinkers around key issues that traverse artistic practices in Mexico.

Essay

Toward a Mutable Biennial: A System of Visibility That Does Not Depend on a Single Milestone, but on Multiple Resonances

by Luis Hampshire

Reading time

6 min

Since its founding, the Rufino Tamayo Biennial has been a crucial device for tracking the evolution of painting in Mexico. More than a competition, it has functioned as a structure through which to read the tensions, drifts, and continuities of a medium that, far from being exhausted, continues to find new ways to breathe. Its origin responded to the need to defend painting at a historical moment when other languages were beginning to displace it—or at least to place it under suspicion. Today, in an ecosystem where painting has expanded into material, conceptual, communal, and process-based territories, that mission becomes more urgent than ever. The question is no longer whether the biennial is still necessary, but how it must transform in order to accompany the present.

Review

The Sacred Wonder: “Trece Lunas” by Chelsea Culprit at Plataforma

by Maya Renée Escárcega

Reading time

10 min

We tend to forget that medieval art was not art. We readily acknowledge that megaliths, cave painting, early ceramics, or Paleolithic figurines were not conceived for aesthetic contemplation; this becomes less evident when considering a sculpture of a saint, a retablo, or a reliquary in a cathedral. Their functions were multiple and diverse, ranging from accompanying social life and exalting the spirit to operating as pedagogical tools. Before the notion of autonomous art—formulated in Europe around the fifteenth century and refined in the salons of the eighteenth—images existed because they were necessary and because they were used.