“Broken Column”

On the opening day of “Broken Column”—a materially diverse and conceptually wide-ranging exhibition about rejection that features works by ninety global artists—some 170,000 people flooded Mexico City’s central plaza, the Zócalo, to watch a screening of singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel’s landmark 1990 concert in the city’s opulent Palace of Fine Arts, the first by a non-classical performer. This accident of scheduling offers a way into Francisco Berzunza’s quixotic exhibition, which materializes his interest as a curator in feelings.

Is affect a robust, or even viable, organizing idea? Berzunza thinks it is. His Trojan horse here is the capacity of rejection to define belonging and shape purpose, be it socially or personally. Juan Gabriel—born Alberto Aguilera Valadez in 1950, but affectionately known as “El Divo de Juárez” in reference to his flamboyant stage persona and links to the border town of Ciudad Juárez—offers a tutorial in this. Rejection is a central theme in his life and work. The set list for the singer’s 1990 performance included the lachrymose ballad Yo no nací para amar (I Wasn’t Born to Love) (1980). “I wasn’t born to love, no one was born to love me,” he sings. “I’m just a crazy dreamer.”

Berzunza—a historian whose experience of “perpetual yearning” for love is central to his recent exhibition-making—prefers to describe himself as a “loser.” This stark characterization, appearing in a curatorial statement introducing his exhibition, is best taken with a pinch of salt. Born into a privileged family and largely schooled abroad, Berzunza has been shaking up what he perceives as Mexico’s fossilized art scene since entering it a decade ago. In 2018 he curated a biennial-like showcase across multiple venues in Oaxaca. “Broken Column” is the closing chapter in a trilogy of impressionistic exhibitions, the previous being about love and sleep respectively hosted by venues in Cape Town (2023) and Mexico City (2024).

“Broken Column” features repeat appearances by Iñaki Bonillas, Dexter Dalwood, Jo Ractliffe, and Slavs and Tatars, who have appeared in all three exhibitions. The title for the latest exhibition is cadged from Frida Kahlo’s agonistic self-portrait, The Broken Column (1944), which depicts her shattered spine as a broken Ionic column. Berzunza initially planned to include a preparatory sketch of it, but after a series of setbacks settled on showing a live feed of the painting in its present home, the Museo Dolores Olmedo, also in Mexico City. It is a cute intervention, a wink emoji in a show replete with insider jokes, but, on balance, trivial.

Far more persuasive, particularly in the way they expand on the exhibition’s title and defining motif, as well as leapfrog over Kahlo’s complicated legacy, are two contributions by Bonillas and José Rojas. A conceptual artist with a deft touch, Bonillas is represented by Orphan column (2025), a photographic triptych describing, in vivid color, an Ionic column fashioned from fragments at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey. Christian zealots destroyed the marble temple in 401 CE. In an easily missed site-specific contribution, Rojas draws attention to a partial column visible beneath a grate-covered cavity of the museum’s extensive courtyard—pre-Hispanic columns, many with past religious uses, were often repurposed in the construction of colonial buildings on Mexico City’s swampy ground.

The Museum of Mexico City, the host venue, is a colonial palace with stone waterspouts in the form of cannons jutting from its exterior. It is located just south of the Zócalo, near where Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortes reputedly first met Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. It is a difficult site, both historically and formally, and has an uneven history as a venue for contemporary art. Curators Okwui Enwezor and Bruce W. Ferguson, the first director of SITE Santa Fe, both mounted exhibitions here in the late 1990s. Shortly after his assignment, Ferguson, in 2000, remarked how, unlike literature, which has hundreds of genres at its disposal, in the visual arts there are “far fewer genres of exhibition.”1

Despite its stated theme, “Broken Column” eschews dry exegesis in favor of enthusiastic miscellany. It does not untangle the meaning of rejection; at best it hints at possible instances in a sequence of choreographed episodes. It is also chronologically jumbled, beginning with Alfredo Jaar’s primitive animation A Logo for America (1987)—“This is not America,” it reads at one point, a provocation lent renewed urgency by Trump-era jingoism, for example, around the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America—and concluding with José María Velasco’s mesmerizing study of a comet blazing over Mexico in 1882, which he revisited in his final masterpiece, The Great Comet of 1882 (1910, not shown here).

In between these historical brackets—of janky agit-prop conceptualism and ecstatic landscape painting—“Broken Column” features an abundance of new work. Some of it, like Marlene Dumas’s diptych After Two Gods (Failure) (2025), two monumental phalluses rendered in black and navy that cite a 2021 painting by the artist, was produced specifically for the exhibition. Ditto José Eduardo Barajas’s 20 × 20 m canvas painting The Soft Motherland (2025), which stretched over the central courtyard like a canopy. Unfortunately poorly lit, deadening the soft tones of yellow, green, and blue, this ambitious work incorporating motifs from Mexican murals, graffiti, and the natural world is rendered in a style best summarized as organic abstraction.

There is a compelling charge to some of the historical painting. It is the first time Tamiji Kitagawa’s Two donkeys (1929) has been shown in Mexico since the Japanese artist’s long and career-influencing residency in the country (1921–36). Six color-drunk works by Zimbabwean modernist Thomas Mukarobgwa offer a mini survey of his so-called Afro-expressionist output of the early 1960s and later reprisals of the 1990s. They appear between Bonillas and Kazakh artist Erbossyn Meldibekov’s Gattamelata (previously Monument to Unknown Hero) (2007), an installation featuring four taxidermied horse limbs that keys into a larger body of work deconstructing Soviet symbols and monuments.

Elsewhere, Berenice Olmedo’s intriguing resin and silicone sculptures about addiction, disability, and repair are productively shown in conversation with Pieter Hugo’s “California Wildflowers” (2014–24), an arresting portrait series made in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco and Skid Row in Los Angeles. Claudia Andujar’s portrait series “A Sônia” (1971), color-manipulated and rephotographed portrayals of an aspirant model from Bahia, joyfully cohabit a room with a set by documentary theater company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, whose solo piece, What do tears do when you don’t cry them? (2025), tells much the same story of the realities of rural Mexican poverty as Juan Gabriel.

These instances of concordance in an imperfect exhibition make an effective case for romanticism, the underlying philosophical basis of Berzunza’s exhibition, as a viable tool of practice, capable of transforming everyday reality through what Walter Benjamin described as “profane illumination”.2 At least, this is the possibility. Unlike Benjamin, whose unconventional 1919 doctoral thesis distilled a viable praxis in the “mystical formalism” of early German Romanticism, Berzunza dispenses with his intellectual ancestor’s “objective irony,” favoring instead a heightened subjectivity, an ever-present and mediating “I” that is, at times, hermetic and cryptic—in effect rejecting the viewer.3