Without Restraint

de Valentina Locatelli, Matthias Frehner, Kunstmuseum Bern

Women artists in Mexico present their lifeworld from a decidedly female point of view and respond to international artistic movements with very different approaches: works by Teresa Serrano (*1936), Ximena Cuevas (*1963), Betsabeé Romero (*1963), Teresa Margolles (*1963), Claudia Fernández (*1965), Melanie Smith (*1965), and Maruch Sántiz Gómez (*1975) constitute the core of this publication. The photographs, videos, objects, and installations from the holdings of the Daros Latinamerica Collection in Zurich take a subversive look at Mexico's national identity. The works call prevailing hierarchies of power into question, including their associated traditional functions as well as the social spaces of women within Mexican society. The apparent banality of everyday things and actions (both in the domestic-private as well as the urban-public sphere) experiences new, deeper meaning and is in part ironically broken.