The work of 30 Mexican artists travels to Spain to expose the "constant battles" of women

The work of 30 Mexican artists will travel to Spain to expose the "constant battles" of women.

An exhibition organized by the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico brings together more than 40 pieces created by artists such as Helen Escobedo, Teresa Margolles, Mónica Mayer or Magalí Lara who denounce sexist violence or challenge the roles traditionally assigned to women.

also aims to make visible the heterogeneity of art made by women.

The exhibition can be seen from February 24 to May 21 at the Casa de México in Madrid and there will also be virtual tours.

The title of the exhibition,

, refers to a photographic series started in the early eighties by Lourdes Grobet.

In it, the artist documents the universe of wrestling in Mexico.

But she also refers to the "constant battles" of women.

"Women have had to fight to build a social space of visibility," Amanda de la Garza, director of MUAC, said this Wednesday in the online presentation of the exhibition.

Currently, 25% of the artists in the museum's collection are women, one of the highest percentages among Mexican institutions.

For some years now, the MUAC, which has the largest public collection of contemporary art in Latin America, has made efforts to add women to its collections.

An image from the 'Welcome to Lipstick' series, which will be exhibited in Madrid.Maya Goded (Courtesy)

"The exhibition aims to show the urgency of changing our cultural references," said Rosa Beltrán, coordinator of Cultural Diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

"It's about turning the world upside down," she added.

The writer has clarified that "there is no aesthetic or methodological vision that unifies the artistic practices" of these women.

“It is not intended to demonstrate that there is a common way of seeing the world, that there is a feminine art.

What appears is heterogeneity ”, she specified.

Within the selection, which exclusively includes pieces from the MUAC collection, there are examples of painting, photography, video, textile art and other formats that address various topics: some challenge gender roles, others try to build identity, others denounce violence...

Among the 46 works in the exhibition you can see, for example,

, by Mónica Mayer, who at the end of the 1970s invited 800 women to complete the sentence “As a woman, what I dislike most about the city is …”.

The result was a metal structure from which pink papers hang and which opens a dialogue about the violence experienced by women in public spaces.

There will also be

, a large-format installation by Marta Palau also created at the end of the seventies.

The sculpture, which hangs from the ceiling, is made up of translucent tubes that have small plush nodules inside that claim textile work.

'Sheltered', by the artist Teresa Margolles.Teresa Margolles (Courtesy)

There are also more recent works by artists such as Dulce Pinzón, who, after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, began to create the photographic series

.

The images show Latino immigrants in the United States dressed up, for example, as Wonder Woman in the laundry room or as the Hulk unloading bananas from a truck.

You can also see the work of Teresa Margolles

, made up of seven blankets used to wrap the corpses of victims of organized crime in Mexico.

O

, by Maya Gode, who documented sex work in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, between 2009 and 2013. There is also a work by María José de la Macorra and another by María Ezcurra that have never been exhibited yet.

The "heterogeneity" that the works show "shows the attitude of women towards art," said Pilar García, curator of the exhibition.

The 30 pieces in the show were chosen by the curator for having been "key" in the history of contemporary art.

“They are pieces that at the time were taking a step further, that are changing the canon”, she has said.

García has warned that "new readings" such as the one proposed by the exhibition, are made "little by little": "Change is not made with an exhibition.

The great exhibitions that have taken place [outside of Mexico] have been by creative men, but we are here to remedy that.

This exhibition is a tribute to give [women] the place they should occupy”.

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