Cynthia Gutierrez: Inhabiting Collapse

A leading Mexican artist counters fixed cultural histories with handmade and artisanal objects

Mexican artist Cynthia Gutierrez (born 1978) is one of the leading figures of contemporary art in Mexico. Through her research-based projects, Gutierrez navigates the relationship between past and present, memory and oblivion. Inhabiting Collapse is based on the exhibition of the same name at the Museo Cabanas in Guadalajara, in which, through the recognition and appropriation of sculptural language, she makes an incisive critique of the discourses that reproduce national identity and the political processes that maintain nation-states. Her work proposes a dialogue between reality and fiction and between the handmade and the reproduction dynamics of capital. Gutierrez works across mediums including drawing, painting, video, readymades, sculpture and tapestries. Her works explore the ways in which identity or nationalism are embedded in objects--monuments in particular--analyzing the ongoing adherence to moral, ethical, political and aesthetic parameters that originated in classical antiquity.