The Museo Amparo safeguards within its holdings works from diverse temporalities and materialities: pre-Hispanic, viceregal, nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary. This exhibition takes the spiral as its point of departure—an image historically associated with the structure of the cosmos, the cycles of life and death, and the connection between the earth, the sky, and the underworld. From this concept, it constructs a layered, non-linear reading of the institution’s memory and the formation of its collection.

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A Spiral Turn traces the museum’s past through the family home in Puebla that gave rise to the collection. It brings attention to works and objects that had remained in storage for long periods of time, in some cases due to their more popular or artisanal character, their anonymity, or their position outside canonical narratives. These enter into dialogue with key works from the collection, as well as with three new commissions by artists Alejandra Venegas, Dulce Chacón, and Tahanny Lee Betancourt, which in turn reference works from the holdings through a New Spanish technique, an unusual object, or imagery drawn from other territories, respectively.

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The exhibition’s layout is itself structured as a spiral. It begins with a display case that functions as a kind of institutional core, then moves through various approaches to intimacy explored through the body and the home, before opening onto nature and distant lands, and finally returning to a gallery where audiovisual material from the institutional archive is projected. In an archaeological manner, the works, objects, and documentary materials on view reveal the richness of this collection, bearing witness to shifting paradigms and transformations in ways of life, systems of belief, technical developments, and forms of representing the territory that houses it.

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Pamela Desjardins | Curator

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