The Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala has appointed the Mexican critic, curator and historian Cuauhtémoc Medina because the curator of its twenty fifth version, to be held from November 2027 to February 2028 in Antigua and Guatemala Metropolis. The upcoming version will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Fundación Paiz, the non-profit behind the occasion, which has helped form and promote the native artwork scene.
Medina brings ample expertise within the scholarly and museum worlds, and on the worldwide circuit of biennials and triennials. Since 1993, he has been a full-time researcher on the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Unam). Between 2002 and 2008, he was Tate Fashionable’s first affiliate curator of Latin American artwork collections. From 2013 to 2024, he served because the chief curator on the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Muac) in Mexico Metropolis, the place he curated exhibitions by artists together with Carlos Amorales, Jan Hendrix, Ai Weiwei, Beatriz González and Magali Lara.
Recognized for his tutorial rigour, Medina has written and edited round 20 books on modern artwork and theorised in regards to the situation of artwork from the International South and Latin America. He has additionally curated recurring exhibitions worldwide: in 2012, he was the top curator of Manifesta 9 in Genk, Belgium, in affiliation with Katerina Gregos and Daybreak Ades; in 2018, he was chief curator of the twelfth Shanghai Biennale.
“The Paiz Biennial is an occasion that these of us in Latin American artwork circuits observe intently, not solely due to its longevity but additionally due to the essential colleagues who’ve led it and the artists who’ve contributed memorable works,” Medina tells The Artwork Newspaper. “Its medium scale and the dedication of the Fundación and its workers have made it conducive to testing superior concepts. I’m conscious that the latest editions have stood out for his or her rising ambition, and it’s a nice honour to have been thought of to form the twenty fifth version.”
Since its inception in 1978, the biennial—the sixth-oldest on the earth and the second-oldest in Latin America, after São Paulo—has developed. After its first 15 contest-based editions, it shifted to a curated format in 2008. Extra lately, Fundación Paiz expanded its native presence by opening the Centro Cultural Fundación Paiz inside its Guatemala Metropolis headquarters through the biennial’s twenty fourth version. The venue presents works from the Fundación’s assortment of greater than 300 items alongside momentary tasks, providing an important exhibition house in a rustic that also lacks a public modern artwork museum.
The upcoming twenty fifth version may even carry the biennial’s position into focus. “At 50, we’re not fascinated with merely celebrating the biennial’s longevity,” says Sonia Hurtarte, the manager director of Fundación Paiz. “We need to query what a biennial can and will do as we speak, significantly when it speaks from Guatemala and Central America to a world artwork world.” She provides that Medina brings “the mental rigour and curatorial independence to problem us in that course of”.
For Medina, the problem is to focus on the significance of Guatemala and the biennial on a world scale, whereas increasing the occasion’s viewers and its mental impression. “It’s a complicated problem, because it have to be an occasion that aspires to cosmopolitan relevance and localised results,” he says.
Reflecting on the position of biennials extra broadly, Medina provides: “I’m conscious of the position these mega-exhibitions have performed in decentring the geography of world artwork and in encouraging the manufacturing of works that escape the figuring out forces of localised cultures and the constraints of particular establishments, markets and consensuses,” he says. “For the one who curates them, it’s each the problem and the chance to remodel a query or critique right into a mark in time.”
