Minerva Cuevas

Minerva Cuevas (born Mexico City, 1975) is a Mexican conceptual artist.

She studied at the National School of Plastic Arts. UNAM (1993–1997). She is known for the social and political research that guide her projects usually developed as site-specific interventions. Her production includes installation, video and photographic works as well as contextual interventions in specific locations. She is the founder of the Mejor Vida Corp. (1998) and member of Irational.org.

She was cited in Rubén Gallo's book New Tendencies of Mexican Art[1]

Cuevas was awarded the DAAD grant in Berlin (2005) and was part of the Delfina Studios residency program in London (2001). She lives and works in Mexico City.

Cuevas also worked with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of their Public Knowledge curatorial initiative. She engaged with local San Franciscans about the city's changing ecology as explored through the theme of fire.[2]

Her work is held in the collection of the Tate,[3] MUAC UNAM, Mexico City, Centre Georges Pompidou, Guggenheim Collection Online,[4] and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Notable Works

Mejor Vida Corp

In 1998, Cuevas founded a project titled Mejor Vida Corp (MVC or Better Life Corporation). A non-profit organization, the corporation aims to aid in small ways those who may be suffering financially. MVC does this through engaging in community welfare, providing free social services and distributing “international ID cards, subway tickets, and barcodes for grocery stores”—all examples of what art historian Pamela M. Lee describes as “movement as a movement,”[5] incremental disruptions of neo-liberalist policy through social welfare endeavors. The program addresses social and economic issues, in what becomes a complex and sophisticated critique of a traditional institution, the capitalist corporation.[6] Professor of Latin American Studies Scott Baugh analyzes this, concluding that, through the satire and parodying of an official business website, Cuevas embodies the “traditions of the film avant-garde and of the Latina/Latino cultural expression…[which] tend to resist, by definition and pragmatically, the conventionality of the mainstream.”[7]

According to Baugh, the digitized radio transmissions of Cuevas's MVC introduce an accessible voice that bypasses the Eurocentric conventions of corporate media and establishes a new mode of active communication with the Mexican working class.[8]

Video and Installation

As detailed by art critic Jean Fisher, Cuevas's written accompaniment to the performance piece, Drunker (1995), presents substance abuse "as a means to 'obliterate’ the anguish of trauma, where the sufferer is caught between the compulsion to bear witness to the catastrophe and the impossibility of articulating it." [9]

Cuevas’s solo exhibitions engage a variety of artistic forms, culminating in multisensory installations that, while operating in high art institutions, advocate public interventionism. Many of these contain specific visual and auditory allusions that generate social commentary. In particular, Cuevas’s Social Entomology, exhibited at the Van Abbemuseum in 2007, employs projected cellular and animal imagery, overlaid with a metaphorical orchestral soundtrack entitled Insect Concert, to remark on human societal structure and its exploitative relationship with the natural world. Critic Francis McKee explains the technological nature of Social Entomology as Cuevas’s evidence for modern humanity’s commodification of animals and the natural world.[10]

In a text entitled “Corporatocracy, Democracy and Social Change (in Mexico and Beyond),” Cuevas co-authors a discourse on the contemporary dissonance between humanity and the natural world. Her remarks affirm her opposition to the anthropocentric attitude driving industrialization, which has historically occurred at the expense of, not only animals and the natural world, but also indigenous and agrarian peoples.[11] Moreover, initially explored in her Information/Misinformation billboard series, Cuevas’s thoughts on the communicative importance of “national rumor” in a modern age find footing in the written record of the Lier En Boog philosophy and art symposium, Ljubljana: Information Strategies, in which she participated in 2002.[12]

Exhibitions

Biennials

  • Liverpool Biennial. GB. 2010
  • 6th Berlin Biennale. Germany. 2010
  • The History of a decade that has not yet been named. Lyon Biennial. France. 2007
  • Três Fronteiras Bienal do Mercosul. Porto Alegre, Brazil. 2007
  • How to live together. 27th Bienal de São Paulo Brazil. 2006
  • Belonging. Sharjah Biennial. United Arab Emirates. 2005
  • On Reason and Emotion. Biennale of Sydney. Australia. 2004
  • Poetic Justice. XX Istanbul Biennial. Istanbul. Turkey. 2003
  • Information-Misinformation. 24th Biennial of Graphic Arts. Ljubljana, Slovenia. 2001
  • Bienal internacional de Fotografía, Centro de la Imagen. DF. MEX, 1999

Selected solo shows

  • Dissidência. Videobrasil, Sao Paulo. 2018
  • Feast and Famine. kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México. 2015
  • Minerva Cuevas. Museo de la Ciudad de México. 2012
  • Minerva Cuevas. VanAbbe Museum. Netherlands. 2008
  • La Venganza del Elefante, kurimanzutto, Mexico City. 2007[13]
  • Phenomena. Kunsthalle Basel. Switzerland. 2007
  • Egalité. Le Grand Café-Centre d'art Contemporain. Saint-Nazaire, France. 2007
  • Reconstrucción. Casa del Lago. UNAM. Mexico City. 2006
  • The Economy of the Imaginary. Luckman Fine Arts Complex. Los Angeles, CA. USA . 2006
  • Not Impressed By Civilization. The Banff Centre. Alberta, Canada. 2005
  • On Property Reg Vardy Gallery. Sunderland, United Kingdom. 2005
  • Schwarzfahrer are my heroes. DAAD Galerie, Berlin, Germany. 2004
  • MVC Biotec Vienna Secession. Vienna, Austria. 2001
  • Mejor Vida Corp. Museo Rufino Tamayo. Mexico City. 2000

References

  1. ↑ Gallo, Ruben (2004). New tendencies in mexican art : the 1990's (Hardcover ed.). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 9781403961013.
  2. ↑ https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/fires-cultural-ecology/
  3. ↑ tate.org.uk Taste
  4. ↑ http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/12020/Minerva%20Cuevas. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. ↑ Pamela Lee, Forgetting the Artworld (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 156.
  6. ↑ Ruben Gallo, New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990’s. (New York: Springer Publishing, 2004).
  7. ↑ Scott L. Baugh, “Cinematic Dis-contents: Addressing a Latina/Latino Avant-Garde through the Browser Apparatus,” Journal of Film and Video 57 (2005), 57-77.
  8. ↑ Baugh, “Cinematic Dis-contents,” 64-75.
  9. ↑ Jean Fisher, “Minerva Cuevas and the Art of Para-sitic Intervention,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 27 (2011): 58.
  10. ↑ Francis McKee, “Minerva Cuevas: Anarchy in the Hive,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 26 (2011): 54.
  11. ↑ Minerva Cuevas and Eduardo Abaroa, “Corporatocracy, Democracy and Social Change (in Mexico and Beyond),” Third Text 27 (2013): 163.
  12. ↑ Annette W. Balkema and H.P Slager, “Ljubljana: Information Strategies,” Concepts On the Move 17 (2002): 77.
  13. ↑ minerva cuevas en la bienal de berlin
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