En Las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Acechan (Within the shadows lurk ghosts of our own In the shadows, our ghosts lurk)

En Las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Acechan (Within the shadows lurk ghosts of our own In the shadows, our ghosts lurk)

Jun 6–Oct 5, 2025

Curated by Fabiola Iza

Featuring Alicia Ayanegui, Enrique Arriaga Celis, Daniela Bojórquez Vértiz, Virginia Colwell y Raquel Bañón Sodini Manuela García, Leo Marz, Jonathan Miralda Fuksman, Daniel Monroy Cuevas, Paloma Rosenzweig and Oswaldo Ruiz

“By definition, a ghost is an immaterial entity. Although it has no body, its apparition affects the present and conditions its expectations. In 1785, the British philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham imagined how the design of spaces could contribute to materializing an ideological system based on respect for hierarchies and maintaining order. This is how the panopticon arose – from the Greek pan (everything) and optis (view)– an architectural model that would enable the exercise of a total vision. Although initially conceived for factories, the panopticon was adopted mainly in prisons, enjoying great popularity until the beginning of the 20th century. Thanks to a central tower that provided a strategic vantage point, all the imprisoned people lived under an ominous sensation of being incessantly observed.

As a scopic design, the panopticon changed how the social Other surveils and marks the individual body, successfully fulfilling Bentham’s goal of provoking a sense of intrusive surveillance in the people observed. Almost two and a half centuries after his creation, the evolution of that omniscient gaze casts its long shadow over the works gathered in this exhibition.

Derived from a paranoid state, the anxious visuality of these works manifests itself in specific ways. As if it were the product of a damaged optic nerve, its vision turns into a tired, feeble one. The contours of their shapes are blurred. Materiality becomes abstract and diffuse. The city, the gaze and surveillance come together in the distorted angles of its landscape and in the saturated contrast of its anodyne sites, in which it is difficult to decipher whether they remain inhabited or were recently abandoned; the disorientation is both spatial and temporal.

Memory becomes fragile; it is manipulated like a thread that runs between the fingers of the hand, seeking to give it meaning through a figure, but its shape changes fleetingly. The darkness dilutes the sharpness of the objects, and their representation seems to emerge from a dream; the images are constructed from impressions vaguely captured in possibly fabricated memories. Among the faint colors and eroded lines, the future disappears languidly and slowly as the ability to conceive a world other than the one we inhabit is discarded from the horizon: exhaustion homologizes the forms.

Some trace the origin of the current surveillance society back to the panopticon, in which the feeling of stalking has become more acute and widespread thanks to the digital revolution. Nowadays, does such constant monitoring undermine political action? When no loophole escapes that intimidating gaze, how can clandestinity be exercised? In the exhibition space, subtle attempts to activate the political exercise emerge: this is deployed in apparently coded languages ​​that evoke ancient expressions but materialize in ghostly beams of light. To prevent the past from floating between history and oblivion, other languages ​​emerge from chance –something caused by complex and non-linear causes that elude prediction– with the desire to create narratives that can collect it, even partially, in fragments. . .

In contrast to the panopticon and its desire for a total vision, the exhibition takes place in a space surrounded by a barricade –messy, irrational, improvised– a fortification created with dilapidated machinery and the remains of the old factory that houses it. As instrumentalized forms of architecture, that is, constructions that become a weapon, barricades create a structure that, contrary to the panopticon, occludes vision: they generate a blind spot, an area out of reach. As an attempt to interrupt time and space, in this parenthesis, time is suspended, and the accelerated pace of the outside slows down. The memories evoked within this loop float, like specters, within it.”

 -Fabiola Iza

En Las Sombras, Nuestros Fantasmas Acechan (Within the shadows lurk ghosts of our own In the shadows, our ghosts lurk) was first exhibited at Laguna in Mexico City, Mexico, a collaborative space for on-site creative production that brings together leading entrepreneurs in design, architecture, urban planning, gastronomy and art. The exhibition is reconfigured for the Contemporary at Blue Star by independent curator Fabiola Iza with support from Contemporary’s exhibitions staff.

About the curator