The Endless Spiral:
Betsabeé Romero

March 30 - September 21, 2025

Originally premiered as An official Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Curated by Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA Chief Curator

The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) is pleased to present the exhibition of renowned Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero, The Endless Spiral, premiered within the framework of the official collateral events of the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia.

The exhibition proposes to explore Betsabeé Romero’s artistic and philosophical journey through commissioned works and new installations presented in different sections. It is a unique approach to the implicit premise of exploring the theme “Foreigners everywhere” - the title of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024 - where dualities, tensions, conflicts and fractures in our culture and history are discussed and reflected upon.

The experience starts with the immersive installation Breaking the Perverse Frontiers of the Mirror, where concave safety mirrors that completely cover the room, observe and distort the reflected image. Mapped and manipulated mirrors, that accumulate physical and symbolic fractures.  The work Fractured Footprints explores the suffering that borders cause: imposed lines that oppose necessity, survival, and understanding, scars that last a lifetime. The installation Memories of a Moving Totem introduces the visitor to the idea of mobility and the symbology of memory instruments, using cylindrical seals that have printed history in all cultures of Humanity. In Families Divided by Sharp Borders the artist questions the concept and experiences of migration in history and highlights how a community can contribute to dismantling its horrors and injustices. Upon arriving at the installation The Shadow of the House Was Also Broken, we see the artist reflect on culture as the home we have inside us; a refuge that has survived in the shadow of all powers. Finally, Dreaming of a Sunrise with Feathers in The Endless Spiral the artist creates a collective and ritualistic space, united by forces of nature, where all can enter and think of the past, present and future of society.

This exhibition is organized with Main Partners: William S. & Michelle Ciccarelli Lerach and Santiago García Galván.

Betsabeé Romero is an artist who has had the opportunity to live and create in different countries, cultures, and contexts, bringing new experiences and perspectives to the examination of essential and urgent topics of our time. In a multidisciplinary manner, the artist creates her works with a strong awareness of migration, gender roles, cultural traditions, religion, and individual and collective memory. Her will, which is also a method, of transgressing the boundaries of different established categories, of making injustice visible in a convoluted world is redefined as a communal commitment through a dialogue between art, social justice memory and heritage, all interacting for the common good.

Biography

Betsabeé Romero (México, 1963)

Lives and works in Mexico City. For more than 20 years, her work has specialized in the elaboration of a critical discourse about issues such as migration and mobility, through the re-imagination of symbols and daily rituals of the global consumer culture, such as cars, tattoos, and urban signage. In the same way, she has been interested in addressing the problems of public art and popular art, its permanence and relationship with the social fabric and with alternative audiences to contemporary art.

She has had more than 100 individual exhibitions on 5 continents, including those of the British Museum, Grand Palais, York Avenue in Washington, the Mexico Pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020, Place Du Louvre, the Vieille Bourse in Lille, the Gran Ofrenda del Zocalo in Mexico City, Nevada Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum, Nelson & Atkins Museum of art, Anahuacalli Museum, Dolores Olmedo Museum, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Amparo Museum in Puebla, MARCO and Monterrey Museum, Canberra University Museum, Museo Carrillo Gil, Recoleta in Buenos Aires, and now at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA).

She has participated in numerous residencies and international exhibitions such as the Havana Biennial, the Portoalegre Biennial, Art Grandeur Nature at the Courneuve, France, Le Clezio at the Louvre Museum, ECO Exhibition at the Reyna Sofía Museum, InSite 97 in San Diego - Tijuana, Bienal del Cairo, Kohj in Bangalore India, among others. Her work is part of important collections such as the British Museum Collection, the MOLAA in Long Beach, California, Museum and Contemporary Art in Houston, Phoenix, Montreal, Daros Collection in Switzerland, Nelson & Atkins, Nevada Museum of Art Collection, World Bank in Washington, Gelman in Mexico, MOCA in Los Angeles, Museum of Monterrey, Museum of Contemporary Art of Portoalegre Brazil and others.

INTERVIEW: Betsabeé Romero & Gabriela Urtiaga, MOLAA Chief Curator.

Gabriela Urtiaga: I would like to start at the beginning, introducing us to your creative process, your concerns and influences, and your beginnings as an artist.

Betsabeé Romero: For me, it was very important to frequently go to the movies, read poetry, go to the ballet, and to the theater; I loved Francisco Toledo, Luis Barragán, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and the pre-Hispanic sites. I always loved going to the Museum of Anthropology and without knowing what that could have to do with art, I loved sharing all the family traditions with my grandmothers, accompanying them to the market, helping them, and enjoying the Day of the Dead among other celebrations that I experienced with my family and where popular art was always a wonderful protagonist.

My degree was in communication; I was able to choose a strange specialty for that career, which was semiotic, linguistic, and participatory research. I was interested in having methodological tools to approach and be able to analyze the topics that interested me. After graduating, I worked in qualitative research and, simultaneously, I was working on my Master’s degree in fine arts, where I realized that this was my path. I then decided to study the entire art degree at the same time, Art History in Paris, but I do not regret anything about all the learning that those years of a job that consisted of evaluating, questioning, and proposing concepts for campaigns that, curiously, many of them were for large vehicle and tire companies.

Gabriela Urtiaga: Being that you grew up in Mexico City and that you have a multidisciplinary practice that you develop in different contexts and different languages. In that context, what were your beginnings like and why is it so important for your creative world to live and produce in Mexico City, one of the most impressive megalopolises on the American continent, and at the same time maintain your strong ties with the international world?

Betsabeé Romero: Mexico City, with its great history, cultural wealth, and a past made up of layers and layers of miscegenation, has always been and has been my great laboratory, my greatest source of knowledge, materials, questions, and concerns, ranging from ecological, even cultural.

I was always struck by the mix of cultures and regions, with so many differences even in cuisine and crafts. In addition to the number of museums in the city, I never felt disconnected from the world, this great megalopolis where I have always had something global and where I am delighted to live, study, and create.

Gabriela Urtiaga: Betsabeé, what you say is very stimulating, since we live in a world that is concerned with labeling and categorizing everything within reach. In your work, we see how you highlight the Indigenous identity, the pre-Columbian; you prioritize body and symbolic language in relation to the territory and mobility, and from your beginnings, you were interested in the intersection between rituals, materiality, and cultural space. Tell us more about your philosophical approach. About that identity deconstruction that we see in your installations, where we find ourselves facing an object or action with many layers of possible readings.

Betsabeé Romero: I have always felt that the culture that surrounded me and with which I learned what identity was very complex and even very confusing. I understood that I would have to invent a woman being in a different way than the one I saw most frequently and that I was interested in identifying with my origins in a different way, searching for the true history of things and people. I didn’t believe much in the official history they taught at school and it was there that I came across much truer stories through art, such as with the Spanish and French novels and later with the great Latin American writers, Borges, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, Mutis, García Márquez, and, in Mexico, Villaurrutia, Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos and especially Juan Rulfo in relation to the layers and layers of identity and history in our Latin American countries.

It was not until I returned from France after finishing the School of Fine Arts in Paris in the workshop of Antonio Seguí, who was precisely a great connoisseur and collector of pre-Hispanic art, that I became aware that what I most needed to know was that pre-Columbian past, I was very interested in understanding and reflecting on the encounter with Europe in the 16th century, visiting and understanding what I could about the Indigenous cultures and from that moment I was lucky to find great teachers such as Dr. Beatriz de la Fuente and Jorge Alberto Manrique who They were fundamental in that formation. Later, with Francisco Toledo and his entourage in Oaxaca, I had a very important encounter with popular art and with another way of approaching the subject. I saw it with him, in a practice that went beyond canvas or paper, building bridges between the population of his place of origin and the knowledge of his past and present. I saw him and accompanied him in some of his tireless struggles such as the defense of native corn. I saw in him an example of an artist whose most important work was to dignify the history and Indigenous presence in our country.

On the other hand, since adolescence, I encountered real and symbolic borders that had to be challenged. I came across multiple walls that had to be avoided to get out of my comfort zone and get to know reality, borders that many times, luckily, did not hurt me directly, but they did hurt millions of women around me. Borders that hurt me to know existed until, in 1997, I came across the geopolitical border most crossed in the world as the theme of the biennial in which I was invited to participate.

The border between Tijuana and San Diego is a border with a culture that has changed a lot locally and that has changed the culture of the entire country at the same time; it is currently an important cultural axis. Since the first time I went, it has become a theme, a character, a rugged and vital territory from which my gaze has not distanced itself since then. There, I found the automobile as a protagonist object of study; I found myself facing public space as the ideal meeting place for my work and with migrant communities that have become the most direct interlocutors with whom to dialogue and construct new meanings. In all those border journeys and since the selection of the first vehicle that I intervened, I have had the tutelage of a great thinker, philosopher, and writer who has become part of my dialogue with and in different borders until today, José Manuel Valenzuela, a great theorist of the border culture and an important part of the Colegio de Frontera Norte and my own history.

Gabriela Urtiaga: I think your work is very revealing and necessary because, at the same time that you are paying tribute to your ancestors, you are commenting on the true power of contemporary society from a more poetic perspective that demands action. In that sense, being an artist who presents her creations internationally, I am interested in knowing what the connection with the public is like. What is your objective in this connection that is so fortuitous and diverse at the same time?

Betsabeé Romero: To answer your question, I will tell you about the totem, which is one of the pieces on display. A rolling totem, made of engraved, painted, and printed tires, an army of small tires that have printed paths, trajectories of ancestral lines in gold, multiple writings and dialogues that make visible and dignify the moving memory of the original cultures of all of America, a long memory that remains a prisoner of modernity, its vehicles, and its values. The memory engraved on used tires, of an abstract, geometric, organic, and sometimes also figurative iconography, which is made of common patterns which are interwoven throughout an entire continent over centuries.

It is an infinite language, woven and baked at many temperatures and in many shades.

Hands of native peoples that carry the genes of great builders of disappeared megalopolises.

Hands that until today are the great protectors of the earth and the forces of nature and that today are the ones who have preserved 80% of biodiversity. (UN)

With my work, I seek to metaphorically reverse the spinning wheel of history to weave its memory in a different way, recording on an instrument that has been erased, run over, and left behind and that has abruptly passed over traces that we cannot forget.

My tires seek to recover the memory of the native peoples in the opposite direction to that of the highways, in resistance to speed as a value par excellence since modernity. My story tells the memory of populations that have had to live in captivity in many ways; that have been made invisible and fragmented in their own territories until today. Thousands of migrants carry within them great warriors who have crossed and been crossed by lethal borders and multiple daily obstacles to survive and support their families. Populations that move, however, and today, I hold them up with their heads held high because they are communities that have been forced to rotate for centuries against the earth, against the asphalt that has been imposed on nature and the planet itself, from the toxicity of the extreme individualism.

Gabriela Urtiaga: What does your presence today at La Biennale di Venezia mean at this very special moment? What reflection do you have in relation to this new context where you specially created new works and installations around six rooms, which are in dialogue with the central theme of “Foreigners everywhere?” How would you like the public to approach this proposal?

Betsabeé Romero: I believe that participating in this great forum is an unparalleled opportunity to take to the ultimate consequences, concerns, and research on which I have worked for more than 25 years, from many territories, both formal and informal, both theoretical and aesthetic, both institutional and clandestine.

I have been a stranger and a foreigner working for the same issues and crossing multiple borders for decades. Topics that have become my territory. That’s why I felt so identified with the statement when I encountered it, even though, previously, you and I were already working on it together.

In that sense, I think we are both interested in it being a body of work where each room has enormous porosity to allow breathing and the flow of all possible views and interpretations.

I know that the most important qualified audience for contemporary art gathers at the biennial, and it is a great challenge for my work to face such diverse and important readings. I am convinced that it will be a process in my work, and we will learn a lot and remember forever.

-March 2024