Relaciones Públicas was founded in 2018 as a site-specific exhibition program and an agency for its fellow artists. It was born as a response to the curatorial necessities of the scene it belongs to and as an important catalyst in the creation of ambitious, experimental exhibitions, especially in the first years of the artists’ careers. RP is an entity that has built upon the agency of self-organization as a method for the accomplishment of independent, collaborative projects. RP depends on the support of sponsors for each one of its projects and continues to build a network of committed supporters. RP is an active participant in the changing needs of its generation, and it is known for its key curation of exhibitions.

Nations, Slavs and Tatars
Gathering, Shanghai
Regiones, Mariana Ledesma
Pies de plomo, Pilar Córdoba Longar
CONDO Mexico City
Pertinent Blackout
Lo más terrible, Josué González
Random Access Memories
Estación Material 1
Shy Cramps, Soft Guts
IUDUIUDUI, Kristin Reger
Garden of Delete, Luis Campos
¿Por dónde sale el sol?, José Eduardo Barajas


Press

✶ Antonella Rava / Founder
ravaprojects@gmail.com
relacionespublicas.art.org@gmail.com
relacionespublicas.art
+525568173016
Nations
Slavs & Tatars
Lisboa 46, Juárez, Mexico City. 
Classroom no. 10


English
Focusing on their capacious printed matter activity, Nations presents ephemera, limited editions, wallpaper and a new poster for the occasion of their show at Relaciones Públicas. One of the first works presented by the collective in 2006, Nations was first exhibited at the inaugural Printed Matter Art Book Fair in 2006 and subsequently collected by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. The work speaks to the collective’s belief in print as a fundamentally democratic medium, bringing together the collective’s singular ability to combine high and low, humor with geopolitics. While print is often considered downstream in the increasingly rarefied and speculated hierarchy of contemporary art, Slavs and Tatars see in print a generative medium: developing into a practice comprising sculptures, installations, public art, film, and lecture performances as well as twelve publications with MIT Press, Mousse, Hatje Cantz and König to name a few. For the exhibition at Relaciones Públicas, a Khhhhhhh leperello-style double sided poster will be printed, featuring a Spanish translation of excerpts from the collective’s book exploring the guttural phoneme, with a new poster on the backside.  

Spanish
Centrándose en su amplia actividad de materiales impresos, Nations presenta efímeros, ediciones limitadas, papel pintado y un nuevo afiche con motivo de su exposición en Relaciones Públicas. Nations, una de las primeras obras presentadas por el colectivo en 2006, se expuso por primera vez en la feria inaugural Printed Matter Art Book Fair de 2006 y posteriormente fue adquirida por el Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York. La obra habla de la creencia del colectivo en la impresión como un medio fundamentalmente democrático, reuniendo su singular habilidad para combinar lo alto y lo bajo, el humor y la geopolítica. Mientras que la impresión se considera a menudo una corriente descendente en la jerarquía cada vez más enrarecida y especulada del arte contemporáneo, Slavs and Tatars ven en la impresión un medio generativo: desarrollándose en una práctica que comprende esculturas, instalaciones, arte público, cine y conferencias, así como doce publicaciones con MIT Press, Mousse, Hatje Cantz y König, por nombrar algunos. Para la exposición en Relaciones Públicas, se imprimirá un afiche de doble cara, al estilo leporello, de Khhhhhhh, con una traducción al español de extractos del libro del colectivo que explora el fonema gutural, con un nuevo póster al reverso.
May 8 - July 5, 2025



Gathering
Concomitantly to the fairs happening during art week in Shanghai, LINSEED (Shanghai) is pleased to announce a collaborative group exhibition, “Gathering,” which cooperates with two independent and avant-garde young galleries: sans titre from Paris and Relaciones Públicas from Mexico City. Taking place during Shanghai Art Week, this exhibition seeks to investigate the dynamic resonances of gallery projects across distinct cultural landscapes, catalyzed by the symbiotic relationships within the art industry. The exhibition will open on 9 November 2024, at Shanghai’s Listen In HQ.  
Relaciones Públicas / Mexico City
Adrián Fierro; ASMA; Aureliano Alvarado Faesler; Luis Campos; Marco Aviña;
Samuel Guerrero

LINSEED / Shanghai
Xolo Cuintle; 卢君意 Lu Junyi
王韵尧 Ernie Wang; Ellen Gronemeyer 

(sans titre) / Paris
Aysha E Arar; Hamish Pearch; Jessy Razafimandimby; 金智亮 Jin Zhiliang;
魏立博 Wei Libo
Nov. 08 - Dec. 08, 2024
Shanghai, China

Regiones que no aparecen en los mapas. 
Espacios catalíticos descomposición

Mariana Ledesma
Mexico City

La exposición individual de Mariana Ledesma en Relaciones Públicas toma su título de un capítulo de Ciclonopedia, de Reza Negarestani, una obra teórico-ficcional que, entre otras cosas, describe el control que tiene el petróleo sobre la civilización humana. Ledesma nació, creció y vive en Salamanca, Guanajuato, una ciudad determinada por su refinería. La obra e investigación de Ledesma circulan en miles de direcciones, emanando de su experiencia vital en el trabajo de la refinería, en la cultura que la caracteriza y en todos los lugares profundamente oscuros de la actividad petrolera.

En su primera exposición con Relaciones Públicas, la instalación principal está formada de camisolas de uniformes de Pemex, intervenidas con aerografía. Cada camisola data una ciudad y una fecha que conmemora un desastre en plantas de Petróleos Mexicanos ubicadas en dichas ciudades. La colección de anécdotas fueron recabadas por Ledesma sobretodo de aquellas contadas por José Luis Sanabria, un trabajador y amigo de Ledesma de la refinería Ing. Antonio M. Amor de Salamanca.

Jul. 07 - Sept. 08, 2024


Pies de plomo
Pilar Córdoba Longar
Mexico City


¿Por qué creía yo que yéndome, la luz no iba a herir mis pupilas?
Federico Falco, Los llanos

Para pisar el acelerador a fondo hay que tener pies de plomo y dejar que el suave animal de tu cuerpo ame lo que ama. La práctica artística de Pilar Córdoba Longar (1981) pone de manifiesto los posibles desastres derivados de la época en la que estamos inmersos, como metáfora de nuestras experiencias románticas contemporáneas. En la fatalidad de nuestros encuentros amorosos se vuelve perceptible determinada velocidad a la cual experimentamos nuestro deseo, la intensidad con la que nos aproximamos hasta extinguir mutuamente lo indestructible en nosotros que puede ser infinitamente aniquilado. Para continuar siendo capaces de reincorporarnos, otra vez, sin interrupciones. Pese a ello, no se me ocurre un estado más abyecto que el estado amoroso, esa parte de la vida que salvamos de la ruina y que sólo cobra sentido si mantiene una relación íntima con lo perdido. Cuéntame tu desesperación
y te contaré la mía.

El centro de resonancia de esta exposición puede entenderse como el enigma de la breve voluptuosidad: “Hay una antigua frase construida letra por letra como un laberinto sin salida, para recordar perfectamente la forma y el contenido de la perdición: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, ‘Damos vueltas en la noche y somos consumidos por el fuego”
. La frase, definida a veces como el “verso del diablo”, proviene, en realidad de la literatura emblemática y se refiere a las polillas inexorablemente atraídas por la flama de la vela que las consumirá. La imagen de la polilla devorada por el fuego aparece
frecuentemente asociada a frases que se refieren a la pasión amorosa. En los Amorum emblemata de Otto van Veen (1608), en el contemplar de las polillas que se precipitan en dirección a la llama de la vela está un amor alado, y la empresa dice: brevis et damnosa voluptas.

La práctica meditativa del bordado, le permite a Pilar la experimentación de un otro tiempo ralentizado e íntimo, en contraste con la velocidad de la catástrofe afectiva que atraviesa nuestra experiencia cotidiana. Este cuerpo de obra habita la tensión entre el imaginario masculinos alrededor de los automóviles y una técnica de producción de imágenes históricamente feminizada, doméstica e
invisibilizada. Bordando sobre una malla reticulada, Córdoba Longar genera imágenes en relación con aquellas construidas a partir de píxeles, que nos remiten a los primeros momentos de globalización cibernética.

– Octavio Gómez Rivero
Jun. 20 - Jul. 20, 2024


CONDO Mexico City
Hosting Rose Easton, London

Condo is a collaborative exhibition by 42 galleries across 20 Mexico City spaces. Host galleries share their spaces with visiting galleries – either by co-curating an exhibition together, or dividing their galleries and allocating spaces. http://condocomplex.org/mexicocity/

Relaciones Públicas and anonymous gallery are hosting Rose Easton (London) with a two person exhibition titled Luxury is personal, by Arlette (Mexico) and Martine Syms (USA). For the exhibition, a new large scale bronze sculpture by Arlette appears in concert with three works by Martine Syms, both multidisciplinary figures whose practices combine memoir, popular culture, gender politics and sex. 

*Preview: Friday, April 12. 11am to 6pm*.
Open thru June 1st, 2024.
Location C. Gobernador Ignacio Esteva 44, San Miguel Chapultepec
Ciudad de México, CDMX 11850 / Floor 3
Buzzer 2#

Arlette & Martine Syms

Download PDF
April 12 - Jun. 1, 2024


Pertinent Blackout
Luis  Campos

Feb. 09 - Mar. 16, 2024


Lo más terrible se aprende rápido
Josué González

There is a void that occupies most of the space where melancholy expands. We’ve built our security with somatized fictions, in this case the home of thought becomes a prison. Space is not a place but a moment, a promise of futility that maintains the sense of survival, not biological but sometimes philosophical. 




Texto
Dec. 2022 - Feb. 2023


RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES
Julio Aquino, José Eduardo Barajas, Luis Campos, Isabel Cavenecia, Marianela Castro, Gerardo Contreras

When a glass of water is spilled over a computer keyboard, minerals and impurities in the water conduct electricity through unexpected paths, causing a short circuit. In the same way, artworks presented in Random Access Memories (or RAM) produce a clash of the digital and physical.
    As children of mass media, the artists in Random Access Memories have a fugitive nature — part of a generation who rely on their inconsistent, evasive and dynamic attributes for survival. Visually and conceptually, the artworks slip through the (already dead) original files; to sample and mix the overload of information producing their own fictions. 
    Memory is flexible. Memories are multiplied, expanded and diluted by our imagination. In contrast to a computer’s hard drive, the RAM is volatile— it retains data as long as the computer is on. For this exhibition(s) Relaciones Públicas mimics the functions of a computer, filling up the RAM until it is no longer capable of processing the data.
    Relaciones Públicas presents an evolving exhibition, in which artists and artworks will be added to each Volume until the accumulated Random Access Memories overwhelm the gallery and must be rebooted. 
    In a way, the artworks added to RAM are the exhibition’s software update, but the cup is already spilled and leaks are finding new paths. In that sense, these series of exhibitions reverberate the disk function (and dysfunction): temporarily store the program of the user’s desire.

– Mercedes Gómez Gonzalez
@beggingformerci
April 30 – August 20, 2022


Estación Material Art Fair

RP is excited to participate in the first edition of Estación Material, in collaboration with Sólida (Oaxaca), presenting works by José Eduardo Barajas, Luis Campos, Alejandro Villa Durán, Adrián Fierro, Samuel Guerrero, Streamweavers_ (estrid lutz & david broner) and Matías Solar.

The group of artists gathered together coincide in their interest in the relationship between the natural and the artificial; in the annulment of the distinction between the technological and the biological, exemplifying the integration of the notion of the Anthropocene to the current art scene. The properties of the native kingdoms of the planet Earth overlap with each other, blurring the boundaries that differentiate them, and intermingling with the fields of technology and the digital world.

The artists in our presentation work with a material reality that integrates synthetic raw materials  (nylon satin, epoxy resin, pyroxylin, fiberglass) and a new vocabulary and visual elements informed by critical stances elements informed by critical positions on a postcolonial, post-capitalist and anti-individualist present.

The presentation in Material celebrates what we identify as a new vernacular language of artists reappropriating elements of popular culture and translating a local present into a global dialogue.
An art that in its manifestations informs on the political conditions that affect us as a society, even in pieces that are less evidently political, and conscious of the political implication of the of conviviality.

October 2021


Shy Cramps, Soft Guts
Luis Campos

Office of darkness or the beauty of writing for colleagues
My work in this text is by no means to explain Luis Campos or to frame his work academically, which in my case would be an outdated or fifth grade academy-style reading, as I do not hold any title that licenses me as such. I am supported by the fiction and theoretical straw of a community that has a special fondness for discursive justification. Nor do I pretend to understand his work or make it didactic for a general public, because this text talks about beliefs, specifically about faith, although I have not yet decided between: to have faith again? to believe again? or how to have faith? In addition to the previously proposed religious exercises, I would like to talk about what appeared to me around his work. I am not necessarily referring to invocations, but to an exercise in the free translation of certain spectra that underlie the darkness of the pieces arranged here. I like to think of Campos' work as an exercise in opacity, that I suspect, is voluntary. That is why I like to write for other artists, because we do not owe each other anything, but we silently assume that we have to believe in each other, although it seems that most of the time we only recognize ourselves among those we consider similar or desirable enough. to deserve a look.

When I walked into Luis's studio a few weeks ago, there were entrails scattered everywhere, nocturnal entrails, to be more specific. As if someone or something had entered that workshop with an open belly and only the entrails had been impregnated. And the body to which they were originally attached would have been hidden. In addition to the fact that I can see an evolution in the guts that have always inhabited his work, that is, the nocturnal entrails so characteristic of his graphic work, which are now exhibited in other formats. I can observe objects that function as a kind of musical instructional. In them, some self-taught artistic processes underlie, which, I suspect, come from an artistic education that is sustained more on YouTube than from any national art institution. These auditory tutorials are not explanatory, or at least not apparently, which confirms that the work set out here does not like to speak or justify itself, as if it were animated but not human. Democratic sculptures that connect the clay to speakers, cables that meet with booties and graphite armor, are just some elements of this installation where the large intestine never ends ... instead of an exhibition composed of separate or autonomous body organs .

Why is the title in English? I asked Campos the first time we spoke. He did not answer the question directly, but appealed to the epistemological musicality that translations provide. I have searched my notes because I am almost sure that I wrote down his exact answer, but that does not matter right now, because not finding it affirms the artist's obsession with restlessness. It seems that what their baroque images want to hide is their own animal desire to produce from the indeterminacy traversed by the artist's chronic insomnia. That also made me think of when I was left alone with one of her paintings, a giant painting that rested in Antonella's living room. He - I would dare to say that this painting is male - and I, we began to see each other, and that guy began to take out his pictorial organs in front of me, that painting was a witness and he knew it. Campos's pieces peek behind the scenes, while listening to some detective clues in the music audios and sculpture-tutorials that will help his paintings to be vulnerable. Another kind of exposed entrails.

You are seeing and you do not see, then. That is what I feel when I see the work here arranged. Or that the pieces are going around me or that there are always hidden images that will be revealed at will. An exhibition that spares its own secrets. Smart thing in a country that gets more explicit by the second. So there I begin to believe. My faith appears before what I intuit, but I cannot see.

Let the search for purity in art die.

Yours truly,

Paloma Contreras Lomas

September 2021

Sept. 09 - Oct. 09, 2021