The Museo Tamayo director talks psychedelia, dreams, and desires

Curator Magalí Arriola maps her journey through 'OVR: Portals'

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<p><strong>The portal</strong></p><p><strong></strong></p><p>A portal is a gateway between different temporalities or geographies, a transitioning space between realities. Art Basel’s latest iteration of its online viewing rooms, ‘OVR: Portals’, proposes a reading of our contemporary condition as we head toward the unknown. The artworks displayed in the viewing rooms create an environment that shows the cracks in our political and social fabrics, highlighting the dissolution of old boundaries, but also the creation of porous new ones. By entering these creative mindscapes, we might be able to apprehend anew the relationship between past, present, and future.</p>

<p><strong>The planet</strong></p><p><strong></strong></p><p>The planet is some 640 light years away, in a constellation named Pisces. One of its sides is constantly exposed to the sun, while the other lives in permanent darkness. The day side’s temperatures reach as high as 2,400C, vaporizing all metals. These are then carried by strong winds to the planet’s cooler night side, where they condense into iron droplets.</p><p><strong>The artist</strong></p><p><strong></strong></p><p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10758/Tania-P%C3%A9rez-C%C3%B3rdova" target="_blank">Tania Pérez Córdova</a>’s work <em style="background-color: initial;">Iron Rain </em>(2020) is a graphite container filled with solidified metal drops. The Mexico City-based artist explores the thresholds that connect everyday reality with emotions, scientific knowledge, and imaginary spaces. Presented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/12669/Tina-Kim-Gallery" target="_blank">Tina Kim Gallery</a>, her work expands the nature of sculpture by creating perceptual lapses and open-ended storytelling. Pérez Córdova’s many crossing paths, conceptual setups, and mismatched pairs all point toward the possibility of an encounter, she says, a notion that is crucial to ‘OVR: Portals’.</p>

<p><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1054/A-Gentil-Carioca" target="_blank">A Gentil Carioca</a>’s OVR, entitled ‘Tempo’, plays with our capacity to decode and relate to distinct historical periods<em style="background-color: initial;">.</em>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/17167/Jo%C3%A3o-Mod%C3%A9" target="_blank">João Modé</a>’s practice reassesses early-20th-century Constructivism from a humane and intimate perspective – what he calls ‘affective Constructivism.’ He transforms the Brazilian tradition of geometric abstraction by incorporating personal objects such as handkerchiefs, tablecloths, or bedsheets into his sewn or embroidered compositions. Modé’s work is presented in conversation with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/search?q=Laura%20Lima" target="_blank">Laura Lima</a>’s series ‘Ouro Flex<em style="background-color: initial;">í</em>vel’ (2005–), for which the artist draws with a golden pen over printed reproductions of paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries, torn from the books in her library. These drawings embody her concept of ‘ornamental philosophy,’ whose aim is to subvert our common assumptions about the redundant and superfluous. As in much of her practice, Lima distorts our perception by transposing the different protagonists of her works – be they art, animals, or human bodies – to unanticipated contexts, thus provoking unexpected experiences.</p>

<p><strong>The journey</strong></p><p>In a similar fashion, at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1088/Chemould-Prescott-Road" target="_blank">Chemould Prescott Road,</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/16453/Desmond-Lazaro" target="_blank">Desmond Lazaro</a> maps his story of migration and displacement using geometric patterns. Trained as a miniature artist, he references scientific research, cosmology, and ancient architecture, while exploring the perceptual thresholds that connect proportion and scale, light and shade, inner and outer space. His presentation echoes&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7234/Jakub-Julian-Ziolkowski" target="_blank">Jakub Julian Ziółkowski</a>’s solo show in the online viewing room of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1114/Foksal-Gallery-Foundation" target="_blank">Foksal Gallery Foundation</a>. Ziółkowski has spoken about his art practice as an internal journey that bridges the divide between the inner and outer worlds. The artist proposes a series of unsettling visions populated by grotesque creatures and dismembered bodies. Produced during the pandemic, paintings including <em>The Transition </em>(2021) – which features a skeleton lying among palm trees under a mandala-style painting – and <em>Puls</em>&nbsp;(2020), which shows a throbbing landscape of dismembered figures and human organs, open an alternate world of psychedelia, dreams, and desires.</p>

<p><strong>The new beginning</strong></p><p><strong></strong></p><p>In Ziółkowski’s <em style="background-color: initial;">The Endless Beginning </em>(2020), a splayed female figure is painted over a tridimensional rock. She is giving birth to an infinite string of screaming creatures that are attached by a thorny umbilical cord. The painting resonates with&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7870/Camille-Henrot" target="_blank">Camille Henrot</a>’s works from the series ‘System of Attachment’, presented in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1215/kamel-mennour" target="_blank">Kamel Mennour</a>’s OVR, ‘A Political Animal’<em style="background-color: initial;">.</em> Works such as <em style="background-color: initial;">Wet Job</em> (2020) and <em style="background-color: initial;">Story of a Substitute </em>(2020) address bonding bodies and acknowledge the physical and emotional attachment inherent in motherhood, as well as the burden of its cultural and political dimensions. Henrot explores what she calls the ‘perversity of care’ in the relationship between individual experience and collective behavior, pointing to the threshold between being one and breaking into another person. Her worldly concerns might make one realize that we are indeed political animals – that is, creatures whose instincts affect public life and, conversely, whose social conduct and collective actions have an indelible effect on the natural world. However, to paraphrase the title of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7779/Latifa-Echakhch" target="_blank">Latifa Echakhch</a>’s maze-like ink painting of 2019, also on show in Kamel Mennour’s OVR, if we realize that when we ‘Turn to the right and then walk five steps before turning to the left, the wind [still] blows through the grass’ on our planet, we should be grateful that we can experience it as living proof of its resilience.</p>

<p>Magalí Arriola is the director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Together with Christina Li and Larry Ossei-Mensah, she is co-curating 'OVR: Portals', which will run from June 16 to 19, 2021. Find out more on <a href="http://www.artbasel.com/ovr">www.artbasel.com/ovr</a>.</p>

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Curator Magalí Arriola maps her journey through 'OVR: Portals'

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