Mexico City: About The Exchange Rates Of Bodies And Values

Mexico City, the place where "Calcutta and Beverly Hills meet every day," presents a radical challenge to all artists living there. Taking the living conditions in the metropolis of 20 million as a point of departure, Klaus Biesenbach, artistic director of Kunst-Werke Berlin, has curated an exhibition about the "exchange rates of bodies and values." Here Mexico City is not only seen topographically, but also a metaphor for the state of a world in which poverty and wealth collide. In their contributions to the exhibition the artists examine these social and economic opposites. They search for subversive survival strategies and use the body as a metaphoric area of projection for the realities of the city. The exhibition was first shown publicly in New York's P.S.1. A version specially developed for Berlin will open in September 2002 in Kunst-Werke. Thereafter the exhibition will travel to the Carillo Gil Museum in Mexico City.

Artists: Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Carlos Amorales, Gustavo Artigas, Miguel Calderón, Minerva Cuevas, Jose Dávila, Ivan Edeza, Jonathan Hernández, Gabriel Kuri, Teresa Margolles, Yoshua Okón, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Pedro Reyes, Daniela Rossell, Santiago Sierra and Melanie Smith.
Curator: Klaus Biesenbach