This post was originally published on artnews.com
Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, an ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
With a commitment to elevating art from the Global South, Brazilian curator Bernardo Mosqueira has solidified a position as one of the most exciting and challenging curators working today. Over a decade ago, Mosqueira founded the experimental arts nonprofit Solar dos Abacaxis in Rio de Janeiro and, in 2023, he became the first chief curator for the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in New York.
For the second year, Mosqueira returns to Mexico City to curate Zona Maco Ejes, a section of the fair dedicated to emerging artists and galleries united under a single theme. For this edition, Mosqueira asked galleries to interrogate freedom, and its relationship to art. That theme is not a new one for Mosqueira, who told ARTnews that he’s been exploring the concept since his first show in 2010. He borrowed the title for his exhibition, “Freedom is Not Enough. What I desire has yet no name,” from a line in Ukrainian Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s debut novel Near to the Wild Heart. In the years since, at Solar, ISLAA, and the New Museum, Mosqueira has curated numerous shows interrogating freedom, both directly and indirectly, and its relationship to politics, eroticism, gender, class, and much more.
“This question of art and freedom is absolutely central to what’s happening right now,” Mosqueira explained. “[This section] is an invitation, even for myself, to be really present and really aware of about what is happening in our context and to not lose attention.”
Ahead of Mexico City Art Week’s kick off, ARTnews sat down with Mosqueira to talk about his ongoing investigations of freedoms, and what has surprised him in working with a new generation of artists and galleries emerging right now.
This interview has edited lightly for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Why did you feel it was important to explore the relationship between freedom and art right now?
Bernardo Mosqueira: It is a very important matter in my work, and, for various reasons, it feels more urgent than ever to discuss freedom, its importance, and the relationship between art and freedom and culture and freedom in our time. It feels particularly interesting to do that inside of an art fair. It is both a challenge and an opportunity to highlight the role of the market in this relationship. I worked with another curator, Matheus Morani, who has worked with me at Solar dos Abacaxis for many years.
Together, we’ve made another very diverse and expansive section. We are gathering 39 galleries. We are showing over 70 artists from almost 30 different countries—most of the artists are young and from the Global South. There is work from other regions too, from what I’d call the different “souths” in the North. We have many solo booths, which is something that I really like. Some of them are more like installations, which challenges the rhythm of the fair. There are some presentations with small works on the walls and some historical presentations of older artists who are finally being recognized. But most of the galleries are young galleries, or other kinds of initiatives, like nonprofits, that are very close to the artists and very intimately devoted to the development and nurturing of their careers.
Do you find that that type of organization is more common in the Global South? Or is that just your preference on what you try to elevate?
There wasn’t any clear instruction or parameters for the section to work with galleries or initiatives from the Global South. In my work at Zona Maco, which is very similar to my work in institutions [like ISLAA or the New Museum], there is a desire to highlight practices that would not be there if it wasn’t for our work. We understand these opportunities as opportunities to dispute: to dispute visibility, to dispute how artworks receive value, to dispute how they’re valued. We understand these occasions as opportunities to occupy these spaces with certain kinds of practices that, as a natural consequence of that, ends up opening more space for artists from the Global South. But it’s not exclusive. There are artists from Italy, from the Netherlands, and from the United States mixed in. But there’s also work from Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Iran, Egypt, Ecuador, Cuba, Latvia, Ukraine, Uganda, and Ethiopia. It is also very nice to see these agents meeting at the fair and seeing what happens when they work next to each other—the artists themselves but also what happens when a gallery from South Africa is next to a gallery from Egypt and a gallery from Ecuador. To see what that triggers in terms of an exchange of experiences, future collaborations, and support.
Curating for a fair is quite different from curating a show at, say, ISLAA or another institution. Could you talk about how that context inflects your approach?
Curators, in general, are mediators. And very often, we are connectors. We negotiate how certain artists, practices, people, or concepts are portrayed. We negotiate how they’re valued and how they are put into relation with each other and to the market. The market has a very strong relationship to the art system in general. Not only when we are working in an art fair, but when we work at institutions, too. We’re always in conversation with the market somehow. It is a great challenge to think about how we can develop these relationships in a way that supports the purposes, politics, and ethics of the work. Curating a section of a fair poses several challenges, but it also allows us to offer opportunities to artists that are important to us. It helps us find ways for those artists to be supported. This is something that excites me. In these situations, we see how we can create, not only situations for these artists to make money, but also for them to meet people who will be important for them. To give visibility to their work from researchers, scholars, curators, museums, and so on. The opportunity to help catalyze these relationships is something that makes this work very exciting for me.
You work with Zona Maco, which is probably the largest fair in Latin America, and you also work with Art Rio, as you mentioned. Does that location and context—the type of collector who would choose to attend a fair in the Global South—open up different possibilities in terms of the work you can show?
Context changes everything. When I am making or composing a section for a context like Mexico City, I’m envisioning the kinds of relationships that we can create by gathering these artists, galleries, and agents together in the Global South. It’s almost like short circuits. I’m thinking about the connections and knowledge exchange and network building that we can create among agents of the Global South. The essence of my work at ISLAA, meanwhile, is more about disputing some value or category or definition from the North. That’s the difference. At Solar in Rio also, we’re thinking about building networks, relationships, and exchanges with Bangkok and Caracas and Cape Town, between the South and the South. When I’m [in New York], there is another kind of politics that I am pursuing.
I’m trying to imagine how the artists from the places you listed in the Ejes section might consider freedom and its relationship to art. These are all countries where “freedom” is a very open, contested concept. Not to say that the concept isn’t contested in the US—because it is—but I think it might be easier for someone to immediately imagine what it might mean for a Cuban artist or an Iranian artist to contend with that idea.
Isn’t it exciting? There is a quote that I love about freedom, which is by Paul Valery in a text called, Fluctuations sur la liberté. The quote is roughly translated to: “Freedom: it is one of those detestable words that have more value than meaning; that sing more than they speak; that ask more than they answer; one of those words that have been used for everything, and whose memory is smeared with Theology, Metaphysics, Morality and Politics; words very good for controversy, dialectic, eloquence; as suitable for illusory analyses and infinite subtleties as for the ends of sentences that unleash thunder.”
It’s an amazing quote because it is incredibly precise. Freedom is, at the same time, the center of the discourse of both the KKK and the Black Panthers, the Israeli and the Palestinian. It is a word that is necessarily in dispute. It is so interesting, to me, to understand how different people, from different perspectives, use freedom in different ways. But it is always in situations of dispute. Different theories from different intellectual genealogies—philosophy, theory, activism—have developed ideas around the concept of freedom in different ways. For me, this is so rich, and it really excites me to hear the Cuban or the Iranian talking about freedom, not because we think that they don’t have freedom there, but because they have their own experiences and theories and ideas around freedom. Sometimes the ideas are connected to other concepts and etymological systems and cultures that can trigger new ways of approaching freedom in our own context. When I think about this kind of gathering, as in this section [at Zona Maco], but also at other group shows that I’ve developed, it has always been with the desire to create some sort of agora of people discussing freedom from different backgrounds.
One time, when I was reporting in China, I was talking to a professor there, who had taught for many years in the US. He would go back and visit sometimes, and whenever he did, his former colleagues would ask him how he could live in China, saying something like, “Oh there’s no freedom there.” He told me he would pity them because they couldn’t understand that there were different types of freedom. His American colleagues’ lives and opportunities had barely changed in all the years he knew them, he said, whereas his friends and family in China had experienced dramatic changes to their economic situations and standard of living. He called it freedom of economic mobility. I think about that often, because in the US, we can take an absolutist, singular position on what we mean by freedom. And there many ways in which one can understand freedom.
In Western philosophy, let’s say critical theory, there is this idea that freedom and democracy happen together, that they were born together, and that they grow together. And this has been questioned from people that live in different contexts. This idea that this strong pairing is connected to ideas of abundance, happiness, joy, and harmony, as if these foundational goals were somehow structured in the pair of freedom and democracy. We are in this moment where people are coming from other places and questioning that connection: Is freedom one thing, or can we talk about freedoms in the plural? And is what we call democracy actually democracy? We are in a moment where all these ideas that were so strongly structured, almost as taboos, by the Enlightenment are being questioned.
We have to actively participate in this questioning. Otherwise, the ones that are going to be questioning it are the ones that are actually questioning democracy and freedom for the destruction of both. This question of art and freedom is absolutely central to what’s happening right now. [This section] is an invitation, even for myself, to be really present and really aware of about what is happening in our context and to not lose the attention.
Is there a presentation or an artist whose work is coming into the section that really surprised you or challenged your ideas around freedom?
In the section, there are some artists whose work deals more directly with political issues of our time and of the past. We have artists that are questioning the idea of freedom itself and we have a number of artists that are questioning the relationship between art and freedom—not as a political issue but more the relationship between freedom and creation. It’s interesting to see how many artists and galleries responded with abstraction, for example, which was not what I was necessarily envisioning when I started this research. But then we encountered it so much that we understood that it was important for this generation. We brought their gorgeous presentations in [to the section] to be investigated.
We have many surprises along the way and I’m excited to see how many of these works manifest in terms of space and the diversity of media, approach, and strategy. There’s a lot of work that feels like a deepening or an expansion, of the ideas of last year’s section [titled “pressure and politics”]. There are presentations that are very much about sexuality, eroticism, gender, free love, other forms of erotic families or erotic communities, and erotic practices. But we also have booths that explore the relationship between Latin America and the US, or historical relationships during the military dictatorships in Latin America.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about the importance of abstraction to this generation, given the history, at least in the US in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, of positioning abstraction as an opposition to Communist and Socialist art during the Cold War. I imagine that’s not necessarily how artists today are using abstraction.
That’s one of the problems with art history. There is this idea that abstraction has one linear history where the peak of abstraction is in the US during the Cold War. But abstraction has so many histories, parallel to that, and completely intertwined too. [Those histories] can come from, say, informal and geometric cultural expressions that come from different forms of Indigenous and ancient art from all the world. Abstraction was used in conjunction with political movements, on the left or on the right, on one side of the Cold War or the other. More recently, there’s been a lot of scholarship produced in relation to abstraction and different minorities: how other forms of abstraction have been silenced or ignored from the canon in the North too.
There’s so much to be to be explored, and it’s interesting to see in this section, particularly, how people have embedded their own explorations of abstraction with history, with issues of gender, with issues related to political imagination, with their experiences of political exhaustion too, or the exhaustions of discursive language. There are some very interesting examples showing why the youngest generation has been engaging with abstraction particularly in its relationship to language. Many artists are often categorized as being a part of social categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality, etc. These artists use their own abstraction as a form of refusal to be categorized in certain ways, to produce works that could be easily characterized as the work of a Black artist or that of an Indigenous artist or that of a queer artist. It operates almost like masks to both hide and express an identity. There’s something beautiful happening in this new generation. It’s going to be interesting to see what’s happens over the next four years.
There’s been this ongoing conversation about whether art institutions instrumentalize certain identities for their own benefit. That refusal you are describing is an interesting development or aesthetic strategy, because it doesn’t allow people to reduce a work or a practice to an artist’s identity, in which artists can opacity as a form of refusal, as theorized by Édouard Glissant.
Opacity is one of the concepts that has been broadly used by this generation but also misunderstood. It’s interesting to see how in the last two or three years, it is actually happening, not only in terms of discourse, but also in political terms. Most of the artists I work with are fighting for opacity with their own works, and not only for themselves, but as an important way to approach the world. They are thinking of it not only as a means of protection, but also as a kind of a mindset shift in terms of how to approach life and existence. If this [mindset] expands, it can be a great contribution of this new generation.
The 21st edition of Zona Maco opens on Wednesday February 5 and runs until Sunday February 9 at the Citibanamex Center in Mexico City.