The blacks in Yvonne Venegas’s photographs possess a fullness similar to the darkness we see when we close our eyes, or to the moment when the lights dim just before a play begins. Both require that interval before we enter the terrain of the dreamlike or the fictional; both are distinct states of reverie. The exhibition Drama mexicano is presented at Lateral, only a few steps from FOCO Lab. Entering a space devoted to exhibiting photographic practices produces singular experiences like that darkness made of ink, inviting us to lose ourselves in the loving—or funereal—stillness of the photograph, as Roland Barthes once described it.

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Tomás Díaz Cedeño’s most recent exhibition, curated by Gaby Cepeda, is titled Withdrawal. When I ask myself about the conceptual implications of keeping the title in English, I realize that its translation into Spanish is ambiguous. Depending on context, it could mean retirada (withdrawal), retracción (retraction), or even baja (as a synonym for loss). The artist’s previous projects lead me to expect formally dense works, industrial assemblages, and heavy materials. How might a title that gestures toward loss accompany work with such qualities? After an intuitive walk through the exhibition, I identify a repeated gesture: holes. Some are abrupt, interrupting the surfaces that give them form. Others are placed with great intentionality, fulfilling specific functions. It becomes evident that my initial question about loss—derived from the exhibition’s title—corresponds to this negativity-that-is-always-positivized in the hole. What unfolds here is an essay on desirous forces traversing what is solid.

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Tino Sehgal’s first solo exhibition in Mexico does not hang from walls or rest on pedestals. Instead, it occupies a far more elusive site: the passage. There are no objects to contemplate, only situations that move through us. A fabric that exists in the interval bodies open up—and one we begin to inhabit the moment we enter the room. The passage does not preexist contact: it is contact. At EstaciónMAZ it unfolds in three ways. Kiss, Kiss (Clean Version), and yet untitled each deploy—through an unceasing transit—the same question: where does the “in-between” happen?

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During Art Week, Eyibra (1992, USA) presented Good Boy, a performance that reflects on how masculinity forged within patriarchal violence is accompanied by obedience, aggression, and attack. The piece took place in the back area of a parking lot. One had to arrive early to secure a spot, as admission was free. Upon entering, the audience clustered at different points behind two rows of iron barricades, leaving a corridor in the middle where the action would unfold.

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