Permanent exhibition

Time in Things III. Contemporary Art Galleries

Our lives are anchored in the age of time. Its apparent direction, determined by unique events in a sequential, progressive, and linear manner still involves the cycles of nature and the cosmos. The essential states of ideas and things are immanent in time, and though they may be defined and differentiated by their geography, politics, and culture, they are indefinitely recurrent.

This exhibition features diverse perspectives about issues that have been current over time, expressed through works that form part of the Museo Amparo’s Pre-Columbian and Contemporary Art Collections. Here, images and objects refer to one another, comparing and contrasting referents from different periods—and in the case of some works, involving diverse fields—while looking for similarities and connections that indicate the changing principles upon which knowledge is built.

Since its opening in 2021, the Contemporary Art Galleries have been in flux through a yearly change of specific pieces, integrating artworks held in storage as well as those that have been recently included to the collection, with the intention of adding new ideas to the proposed discourses throughout the exhibition.

The works that make up this third rotation are clues that lead us to different scenarios and contexts of the past and the present crystallized in the collective imagination. Each section presents iterations of four central motifs: time, territory, the forces of nature, and human drives. These concepts are intertwined with discourses that examine issues and ideas dealing with the impact of the overexploitation of natural and cultural resources; the notion of death and renewal; the territory as an open field or as a setting determined by the dynamics of power, violence, and memory; imageries based on culture, nature, or entelechy; the boundaries that constrain what is formless, or a hallucination; ideas that go against the grain of official history, the challenges of cultural resistance and the fall of ideals. Latent questions within these dialogues, affirm the fact that the past does not go away, and neither does the present—instead, they become cumulative and affect one another.

Tatiana Cuevas Guevara | Curator