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press: Institutional Critique That Makes You Laugh and Cry

MEXICO CITY — Materia estética disponible, Miguel Calderón’s current show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, which debuted at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey (MARCO), is a perplexing survey of gritty works in installation, photography, and video spanning 30 years. The works play with fact and fiction to shed light on institutional critique and transgressions around class, violence, and corruption with humor and irony. They also draw from La Panadería, an alternative art space that Calderón, an outlier of sorts, ran with Yoshua Okón in the 1990s out of a former bakery in la Condesa. During this period, Mexico City was reeling from the aftershocks of Zapatista uprisings, the peso crisis, economic hardship, and kidnappings.