ERICK BELTRÁN

Studied at the Escula Naciona de Artes Plasticas, Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico and artist-in-residence ENSAD, Paris and Rijkakademie van beelden knunsten, Amsterdam.

Recent exhibitions include, “Haunted by Detail,” De Appel, Amsterdam 2002; “Coaratada/Alibis,” Witte de With, Rotterdam 2002; “ABCDF,” Palacio de Bellas Artes 2002, Mexico; “Pulpa,” Centro Wilfredo Lam, Cuba, 2002; “Advertising, Interventions,” ACM, Mataro; “Se rendre a l’evidence,” Centre Culturel de Mexique, Paris 2001; “Rotacion,” MUCA, Mexico, 2001.

Personal exhibitions in Mexico and abroad such as: “Stochatic Archive,” SAPS, Mexico, 2002; “Merma,” SNAP Gallery, Edmonton, 2001. His work usually finds the form of publications and books like: “Printed Matter, 4th April 2002,” Witte de With; “No Anunciar,” Fuera de registro; “The Inhabited Image,” EC.

Erkic Beltran explores in his work various communication structures and information mechanisms in contemporary society. He has always been interested in the concept or dislocations of social orders.

XIMENA CUEVAS (b. Mexico City, 1963)

“Ximena Cuevas is Mexico’s video artists extraordinare: half magician, half mermaid, master of all she surveys. Cuevas looks upon her beloved metropolis of Mexico City with an eye both jaundiced and passionate. At the same time, she has turned her camera back on her own daily life and charted the quotidian pleasures and crises found therein. Her camera is expressive and inventive, her editing style jaunty and edgy, her musical taste unerring. Whether her subject is lesbian romance or heterosexual machismo, you couldn’t ask for a better guide.”
-B. Ruby Rich
San Francisco, 1998

Cuevas’s cinema education began at age thirteen when she viewed an average of four films a day for two years straight, while cutting classes from the junior high school in Paris. During this period she also perfected the technique of hiding in bathrooms during the interlude between film functions. At sixteen, she had her first hands on contact with film, repairing old movies in the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City. At eighteen, she worked as an art assistant on Missing by Costa Gavras and studied film at both the New School for Social Research and Columbia University in New York City.

Between 1980 and 1990 she worked on more than 20 feature films and held such diverse jobs as script supervisor, assistant director, art, and stand-in. Her credits include films such as Under the Volcano by John Huston (script supervisor and production assistant), The Falcon and the Snowman by John Schlesinger (art assistant and stand-in), Mentira Piadosas by Arturo Ripstein, Ecnuento Inesperado by Jamie Humberto Hermosillo (assistant director).

In 1991, she bough a video 8 home movie camera and “retired” from film. She states, “When I was a child, my favorite game was to climb over fences, to hide under tables, and to listen to the everyday conversations of strangers. From that invisible perspective, I would reconstruct the lives of those people. The video camera continues to exert over me that fascination with secrets, and I wouldn’t change the private act of video for the big apparatus of film.”

Cuevas is obsessed with the micro movements of daily life, with the border between truth and fiction, with the “impossibility” of reality. Her work relentlessly seeks out the layers of lies covering the everyday representations of reality and systematically explores the fictions of national identity and gender. It redefines the meaning of documentary. Her video have been shown in festivals such as the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Berlin, and Montreal, and she was the featured artist at “Video Viewpoints,” in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been an invited speaker at numerous events, including those sponsored by the Pacific Film Archives in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Guggenheim in New York, and most recently in June of 2000 and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Among the many grants she has received are those from the FONCA (Mexican National Endowment for Culture and the Arts), the Eastman Kodak Worldwide Independent Filmmaker Product Grant, and the Rockefeller, MacArthur Lampiada grant. Her most recent work includes Dormimundo, a documentary about the discomfort of being, with which she was the guest artist of the Central New York Programmers Group fall tour of 2000.

In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired nine of Ximena Cuevas for its permanent collection. Ms. Cuevas is the first Mexican video artist in its collection.

Mario de Vega (b. 1979, Mexico City)

Studied Linguistics at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana and Stage design at Escuela Nacional de Arte Teatral. De Vega done the sound design for several theatre plays in Mexico City, including Vision Capita, directed by Phillipe Eustachon. He has collaborated in a number of sessions of sound improvisation in Mexico City, Cuernavaca Morelos, Quebec, and Guanajunato with musicians such as G. Bringas, U. Schicht, and H. Tammen. De Vega has also participated in the International Festival of Sound Arts in 2002 and the X International Festival of Performance. Both festivals were organized by Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City.

In 2002, he received a grant from the Secretatia de Cultura de Mexico for the development of a sound project for the blind. Recently, he was invited to be an artist-in-residence in the AVATAR art studio in Quebec, Canada.

Pablo Helguera (b. Mexico City, 1971)

Pablo Helguera is a multi-disciplinary artist living and work in New York. He studied at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico, University of Barcelona and at the Art Institute of Chicago where he obtained his BFA degree in 1993. He has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Barcelona, Athens, Buenos Aires, Basel, Recife, Mexcio City, Guadalajara, and other cities. In 2000, he presented solo exhibitions at the Galerija Matice Hrvatska, Azgreb, Croatia, the University of the Andes, Bogota, Colombia, Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo, Mexico City and the Dominican University, Chicago, Illinois. In New York, he has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum, the Armory Show, and in various alternative spaces and galleries throughout the city.

He participated in the large scale exhibition “Politicas de la Diferencia, arte Iberamerican de Fin de Siglo,” organized by the Consocio de Museos de la Comunidad de Valencia (IVAM) and presented in the Pernambuco Centor for the Arts in Recife, Brazil and at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He also participated in the exhibition “Museutopia,” presented at the Enst Osthaus Museum der Stadt-Hagen in Germany in 2002. Additional projects include a public art project for Alexanderplatz in Berlin, the exhibitions “Instituto de la Telenovela,” in Gallery P74 in Ljubljana, Slovenia and a performance title “Theatrum Anatomicum” for PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens and the IFA gallery in Bonn.

He has been the recipient of various distinctions such as grams from the Fideicomiso para la Cultura/US-Mexico Fund for Culture, the Government of Italy and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. He also curated the exhibition “Concerning Truth,” in 1998 which simultaneously took place in three contemporary art locations in Chicago and included a vast array of international artists. His work both as an artist, writer and educator deals with analyzing the context in which art is presented and transmitted to audiences. Following this interest, in 1999 he organized the symposium “Fiction Inside and Outside of the Museum,” at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. In March of 2000 he was one of the organizers and participants of the symposium “The Artist and the Museum,” at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Columbia. He also organized the symposiums “Brazil: Cross-Cultural Terrains” at the Guggenheim and at the National Center for the Arts in Mexico City. He has been selected as one of the organizers of the international forum of contemporary art in ARCO, Madrid, for 2003.

As a performer, Helguera has presented a variety of solo pieces such as “Empty Days” (1993), “Circorama of Operistic Nostalgia” (1994), “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci” (1995), “Muitos Fernandos” (Homage to Fernando Pessoa, 1998), and is the autor of two produced plays, “The Palace (and Other Pilsen Ghost Stories),” and “Jurura,” (both from 1997)

Pablo Leon de la Barra (b. Mexico City, 1972)

Operates in the intersection existing between art and architecture. His work questions the appropriation, variation, translation and migration of the images of modernity within different contexts, as well as their public and private, interior and exterior manifestations.