South likes: Mariana Castillo Deball at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

South likes: Mariana Castillo Deball at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
Vista de Ojos
Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico
1 July – 6 September, 2014

Text by Klea Charitou

After her participation in the last dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel and recently in the 8th Berlin Biennale, Mariana Castillo Deball returns to her birthplace for a first solo show under the title Vista de Ojos at Kurimanzutto. Inspired by Mexican history and culture, Deball acts, besides the artistic process, like an investigator, which follows a long process to collect essential data from ethnographic collections, libraries or historical archives.
Borrowing from the cartography language of the 16th century, using the expression “vista de ojos” (eye view) as the title of her central piece, the artist decals on the gallery’s floor the famous Uppsala Map (1550), which is considered as one of the oldest and most faithful reproduction of Mexico city and its surroundings. The engraved wooden pavement represents the outline of the city, where the colonial settlements of conquistadors are depicted as a series of uniform city blocks in european style. In the surroundings, the environs shows the indigenous engaging in everyday activities, as transferred through the eyes of an indigenous cartographer. At the same time it constitutes a multicultural mash-up for deriving information about geography, vegetations and social life of the period and it functions as a printing matrix which inherits its traces to the modern-day capital of Mexico. This atlas offers a divided perception of the space and a comment on the way people reserves information, cutting the entire surface of the map into pages. The origins of her second piece UMRISS are to be found in an 1980s brochure that was the Mexican translation of an  american antipsychotic medicine. Inspired by the original version, the brand used as an advertising illustration the backside of Mexican masks instead of their  African and Canadian equivalents. The artist simulated the layout of this advertisement, photographing masks that are situated in the Ethnographic Museum of  Berlin and vestedwith sarcasm the media practices and the way that national symbols and history are treated. The complete synthesis emerges as a panorama of different voices in which history and reality becomes an entrancing blend.

http://www.kurimanzutto.com/english/news/mariana-castillo-deball.html