From September 30, 2016 to January 1, 2017
Curator: Gabriel Escalante

Los Anticomerciales, Francis Alÿs, Horacio Cadzco, Yanieb Fabre, Cacahuates Japoneses, Claudia Fernández, Taka Fernández, Thomas Glassford, Verena Grimm, Rubén Gutiérrez, Natalia Ibáñez Lario, Martín Núñez, Renato Ornelas, Alejandro Palomino, Vicente Razo, Carlos Reygadas, Guillermo Santamarina, Joaquín Segura, TEP (Taller de exhibiciones potenciales), Álvaro Verduzco and Alfonso Zárate

“I can´t describe the flavour in words. But I feel like it give me impulses that might lead to words”
–Simone

“Con estas sombrías palabras empiezo mi relato”
–Wordsworth

The project Nosotros ya no somos los mismos (We Are No Longer the Same) is a video panorama that seeks to show a series of qualities, vices, and idiosyncrasies in contemporary Mexican society that have changed very little over the past twenty years. Among other aspects: our way of interrelating, our language, how we think, how we operate, as well as social behaviors that configure the archetype of a society incapable of exercising any self-criticism of its acts.
The title suggests a failure to face up to our present circumstances with respect to the past: it is not simply the passage of time that changes us. The exhibition does not seek to make proposals in any literal sense, nor does it assume a pessimistic stance with regard to the current circumstances of the Mexican people. It offers us rather a diversity of ways to understand ourselves as a society, to look at ourselves, with all the virtues and defects that define us and have constructed our identity as a nation: our nation, the nation of those participating in this exhibition. In structural terms, it is composed of video formats (no film, no animation), with works conceived from the start for this medium. It includes the work of twenty-one Mexican and foreign artists who live or have worked in Mexico.

The selection includes a range of artists of all ages, well-positioned in the field of video, as well as internationally respected artists who have had a strong influence on practice in Mexico. The works are by turns ironic, emotive, sardonic, abstract, timeless, or cryptic, to mention only some of their emotional and interpretative facets. Some seek to subscribe to a supposed change of personality, of ideas which need to be renewed over time, but which, in the face of current circumstances, show signs of violence and apathy, of an inequality we have become accustomed to seeing and living with. Nosotros ya no somos los mismos is a body of work articulated along a serious axis and aimed at an audience interested in the social and political situation of Mexico.

Gabriel Escalante