Naomi Rincón Gallardo (b. 1979 Raleigh, North Carolina) lives and works between Mexico City, Mexico and Vienna, Austria. Recent solo exhibitions include “Una Trilogía de Cuevas [A Trilogy of Caves],” Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca (2020); “May your thunder break the sky,” Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria (2020); “Heavy Blood,” Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2019); and “Opossum Resilience,” Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca (2019). Her works have been shown in exhibitions and screenings including the 59th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2022); 34th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2020); MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna, Austria (2019); Pacific Standard Time. L.A.L.A., Los Angeles, CA (2018); FEMSA Biennial, Zacatecas, Mexico (2018); The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2016); Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany (2016); and Nicaragua Biennial, Managua, Nicaragua (2016).
Naomi Rincón Gallardo, The Formaldehyde Trip, 2017. Photo: Eliana Cetto
7:00 PM EDT
New Museum Theater
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
Ticketing and Event Details at the New Museum
Join artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo (b. 1979) for a performative screening of her film The Formaldehyde Trip (2017) in the New Museum Theater. A dynamic and experimental story-teller, Rincón Gallardo mixes live performance with video projections to expand upon her “mythical-critical Surrealist” narratives, using precolonial myths to find anti-colonial poetic weapons against injustices of the present. The accompanying exhibition, Screens Series: Naomi Rincón Gallardo, is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.
Made in honor of human rights activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño, The Formaldehyde Trip imagines the activist’s passage through the underworld after she was murdered in a paramilitary ambush in April 2010. Through music, dance, improvisation, digital animations, and excerpts of speeches by Cariño, the lively, eventful, and mesmerizing journey unfolds as a series of encounters with spirit animals, women warriors, witches, and Mesoamerican deities. The journey is narrated from the perspective of an axolotl preserved in formaldehyde, played sometimes by the artist herself. Almost extinct in its natural habitat, this species of aquatic salamander explains to us how Cariño’s murder is directly associated with the maintenance of colonial power structures.
Featuring an original soundtrack by composer Federico Schmucler set to Rincón Gallardo’s lyrics, the film comprises nine distinct musical numbers with interchanging parts in Spanish, English, and German. In this her live performance of The Formaldehyde Trip, Rincón Gallardo expands “Bety” Cariño’s feminist legacy and challenges hegemonic forms of social categorization and hierarchization, imagining a vibrant and surreal environment of pleasure and flourishing interdependence in the face of brutality and expropriation.
This event is co-presented by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) and the New Museum.
Bernardo Mosqueira is a curator and writer based in New York and Rio de Janeiro. He is the ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum. He is also the founder and artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis, an institution for experimentation in art, education, and social transformation in Rio de Janeiro, and since 2011 he has directed Premio FOCO ArtRio, a national award for emerging artists. Mosqueira previously organized the performance festival Venus Terra and worked as a curator at Galeria de Arte Ibeu. Mosqueira has been curating exhibitions, editing books, teaching, and contributing texts to art publications since 2010; was awarded the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi in 2017; and cofounded Fundo Colaborativo, the first emergency fund for artists in Brazil, in 2020. His recent exhibitions include Miriam Inez da Silva at the Museu da República, Brasília (2021); Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021); and Daniel Lie: Unnamed Entities at the New Museum, New York (2022).