Alondra Flores Soto
La Jornada Newspaper
Saturday, May 25, 2024, p. 2
Art may be happening right next to you at the exhibition casts, in the Tamayo Museum, and not knowing it: a man who sobs, a pregnant woman who walks through the corridors, a pack of dogs sleeping on a pile of rugs or a custodian who hums. With these acts that come to life discreetly and intermittently, Nina Beier proposes bringing together sculptures and performances in a single proposal.
The term casts makes a play on words, since this title in English refers to a sculptural process based on molds, but at the same time to the cast of actors.
The Danish artist participated on Thursday afternoon in the opening of the exhibition in the museum located in the wooded area of the Chapultepec Forest, where the visitor can randomly witness some of the acting actions until September 29.
Accompanied by Magalí Arriola, director of the venue dedicated to contemporary art, and the curator Aram Moshayedi, she mingled among the group of people who attended the first minutes of the exhibition and toured the set of proposals installed in the staggered rooms of the building.
When approaching the crushed marble façade the first encounter occurs, if you are observant, as a shoe inserted under the glass door prevents it from closing. “The exhibition becomes the setting for a series of meetings performative, discreet and intermittent, which redefine the content of the exhibition rooms from one moment to the next”, introduces the curatorial text that gives a brief explanation at the beginning.
Water gushes from the eyes of a pair of bronze sculptures of a reclining woman and a kneeling child. These pieces from the series were moved to the Tamayo room. Women & Children, which has traveled to several cities around the world. In front it is possible to look and walk between Guardians, 10 marble lions mounted in other contexts. In this case, he placed textiles on their backs. In another area he distributed 2,500 pots with plants that make up Fields, that coexist with porcelain dogs, vases, child mannequins and a mechanical bull.
Unlike a typical exhibition where you move from one work of art to another, life happens around you
described the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where Beier participated in the group exhibition in 2022 Lifes.
Interrelation of disciplines
Curator Aram Moshayedi highlighted the importance of the interrelationship of Beier’s practice between sculpture and performance. The hope is that this alloy of disciplines in the exhibition will allow them to acquire a new meaning and way of being observed.
One of the aspects of Nina’s practice, which I am particularly attracted to, is that each work moves through different meanings.
For example, with the change in the local context in how it is received and the materials that make up some pieces change.
With the artist at his side, who nodded and smiled when she heard the explanation in English, the curator residing in Tamayo pointed out that for her it has meant an emotional effort when looking at her own relationship with the path of her past works, since with Casts 20 years of career are reviewed.
The also acting chief curator at the Hammer Museum pointed out that something relevant is how the meaning of an exhibition is constructed. Along with the double meaning of the works, a nature of contradiction also persists, influenced by the burden of each viewer’s personal baggage.
I think that the Tamayo is a perfect architectural context for this work, because much of what Nina thinks has to do with the categories of the way we establish a relationship with the natural world and how this is mediated through sculptural forms.
; Such confrontation is achieved thanks to the windows, natural light and the context of the exterior.
Nina Beier (1975, Aarhus, Denmark) maintains a relationship with Mexico that dates back several years, her first individual exhibition was in 2013 with Tragedy Teaser, at Proyecto Monclova, where he exhibited again in 2014 with Valuable. In 2017 it had a retrospective at José García in Mexico City, and in 2020, Hard Feelings, at the José Clemente Orozco Workshop Museum, in Guadalajara.
Currently, the Amparo Museum, in Puebla, houses casts, which include sculptures of marble guardian lions, similar to those that rest in the lower part of the Tamayo lobby, as well as their remote control cars equipped with human hair wigs that come out from their interior cabin.
