FEMSA Biennial Celebrates Reflections and Open Dialogue from the Art Community

The exhibition 30 Years in the Art World. A Review of the FEMSA Biennial, curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga, commemorated more than three decades of the FEMSA Biennial in the city where it was founded and where it held its first 12 editions. It also opened a space for dialogue where the voices of key players in its evolution from a competition to a traveling curatorial platform converged.

The public program, which attracted hundreds of people in person (at the Centro de las Artes and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey) or virtually, sought not only to delve into the multiple interpretations of the exhibition but also to offer tools for new critical, sensitive, and creative approaches through cultural mediation.

“This public program explored three key themes of the exhibition: a look at the biennial's transformation processes, which have been a part of it since its founding; the contextualization of its transformations in relation to other national initiatives and the global process; and the perspectives of key players in the biennial (artists, managers, curators), who have witnessed its development and that of the art world over the past three decades,” explained Christian Gómez, guest curator of the public program for the FEMSA Collection and Biennial.

The exhibition, which featured more than 80 works by 54 artists, began with an opening talk by Garza Usabiaga, the exhibition's curator and artistic director of the 12th edition. Mariana Munguía, director of the 15th edition of the FEMSA Biennial, "The Voice of the Mountain," and Willy Kautz, responsible for the biennial's transformation toward a curatorial and traveling model, as well as artistic director of the 12th and 13th editions.

This talk highlighted the visionary and receptive nature of the biennial, which, from its first editions, began collecting installations, thus recognizing this new artistic manifestation that was novel in 1992.

Later, in the conference "A Biennial Is Born, the FEMSA Biennial," Jorge García Murillo, founder of the event, spoke about the history of the biennial and how it managed to promote the art developed by creators within the organization so that it could be disseminated and appreciated both in Mexico and abroad.