Cynthia Gutirrez: Inhabiting Collapse [Paperback]

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

Mexican artist Cynthia Guti?rrez (born 1978) is one of the leading figures of contemporary art in Mexico. Through her research-based projects, Guti?rrez navigates the relationship between past and present, memory and oblivion. Inhabiting Collapseis based on the exhibition of the same name at the Museo Caba?as 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. Guti?rrez works across mediums including drawing, painting, video, readymades, sculpture and tapestries. Her works explore the ways in which identity or nationalism are embedded in objectsmonuments in particularanalyzing the ongoing adherence to moral, ethical, political and aesthetic parameters that originated in classical antiquity.