Until 14 June, the Instituto Cultural de México in Spain presents the exhibition Guerreras en el tiempo (Female warriors along time), by the artist Mónica Dower.
Committed to critical reflection, this artist, who teaches at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”, empties herself of fundamentalist convictions by fiercely scrutinising her own and (apparently) other people’s origins. From its expertise in the compilation of data and evidence, an ordering principle is imposed: there are wills, not races; consequently, values, not creeds, become defensible.
About the exhibition, Monica Dower says: “Most of the women I want to paint are anonymous; they are women I have encountered in the various investigations carried out in my previous series, Chorzele/Oaxaca. What has struck me most in these dives into the archives of the web are the women dressed in their finery, mostly ready to please, ready to marry, even though they are extremely young. Prisoners of their feminine condition and their cultural role, I want to bring them with me, to mix them in this time, to weave with them a subtle and beautiful weft that places them in a new symbolic register and in the foreground (no longer the background), in alliance with visions and designs that go beyond the exclusive Western gaze. This new register takes up the original aesthetics, draws inspiration from them and extends them, no longer as limiting or reductive elements, but as a field of memory that recognises them and gives them a place”.
