An Age of Historical Ambivalence: Interview with Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina, currently the chief curator of the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, was appointed curator of the 12th Shanghai Biennale barely a year before the show’s scheduled opening. Known for his collaborative working style, he assembled a team of curators from South America, Japan and China to assist with the mammoth task of putting together the exhibition. In January, he announced the biennial’s theme—“Proregress: Art in the Age of Historical Ambivalence,” which references the poetry of EE Cummings, as well as sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman’s 2017 musings on Retrotopia.

An art critic, curator and historian, Medina holds a PhD in the history and theory of Art from the University of Essex and a BA in history from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has curated the Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, the 9th edition of Manifesta in 2012, as well as significant projects in the United Kingdom, Mexico and the Americas. 

I met with Medina at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art, the venue for the upcoming Shanghai Biennale, to discuss his objectives with the exhitbion, life in Shanghai, and defining ambivalence in an era of rising ethnonationalism. 

Have you spent much time in Shanghai? Have you had an opportunity to get an understanding of the social issues pertinent here?

I have been here seven times in the past year. It’s a very paradoxical place, because of the political situation. One challenge that I faced was the amount of people that I had to visit, because the biennial mandate requires that one third of the participating artists are Chinese. That forced us to do a lot of research. 

How did you come to decide on the theme of “Proregress” for the biennial?

In recent years, I’ve been trying to fill certain blanks in my reading history, and I decided to reread EE Cummings. Cummings’ poetry is refreshing; it pulls you to think in many directions. But I stumbled with the word “proregress,” which he coined. Cummings was critical of the positions of the political left, but there was something extremely fascinating in the way that he transitioned from theatrics against the concept of progress to conceptual meanderings in his theories. He brought together opposite notions in such a way that they became vicious circles, but, simultaneously, each concept is fulfilled by its opposite. I thought—this was during the early days of the Trump administration—Cummings is describing something that I am currently witnessing: the loss of orientation. 

I had been playing with the idea that, in a different way, the geopolitical “global north” is lost. I was reading texts that discussed certain key social developments and that argued there has been a loss of categorial significance. An important example, as is put forward by several artists, is the supposed collapse of the boundaries between nature and society. Particularly, these artists have homed in on animal rights and the legal concept of what can be represented in court, seeing the granting of legal personhood to a forest in South America, and to a river in New Zealand, for example, as representative of that presupposed collapse of definition. In different clusters of thinking there are variegated, floating ideas. When I was invited to curate the Biennale, these thoughts about blurring and ambivalence were already brewing in my mind.

Bauman’s writing touched on the idea that European society particularly, had traded personal freedoms for individual security. How are you exploring that concept? 

There is a whole line of research on art movements that describe how our political landscape is inhabited by extreme ambivalence with regard to emancipation and the way new forms of oppression and domination emerge. Effectively, we have trouble reconciling political power with how it develops into forms of control. There is this paradox, which is that we could be in agreement about what needs to be done for issues such as climate change, or aging populations and the movement of migrant workers, but not who is to do it.

Is ambivalence a symptom of privilege?

I disagree, precisely because instability is experienced by developing populations in paradoxical ways. I would go so far as to claim that there are significant advantages that undeveloped countries have. While there is insecurity, the distribution of information has transformed the centrality of cultures and the way they operate. For instance, the thing that is both lost to and provoked by the perceived threat of the Intifada and Muslim violence, is the fact that this is a particularly rich time for Muslim culture. What has been eroded is the clarity with which one can talk about the developed and undeveloped worlds. At the same time, there is a sense that the balance of political forces in the world are changing.

One of the aims of the Shanghai Biennale is to “serve as a platform for the self-portrayal of China.” How will the 2018 edition achieve that?

One of the questions of the Biennale committee was what is the business of China in this project? My answer was to explore the dynamism of China and the idiosyncratic political experiment it involves; the success of the socialist economic formula is one of the factors that is transforming this period of time suddenly and unexpectedly, and is an expression of the fact that the presumptions of the world need to be reviewed. The presumption that capitalism and liberal democracy both need to be logical terms in a proximal equation is challenged everyday from this particular spot on earth.

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama is re-evaluating his assertion that the spread of liberal democracy signals the end of our sociopolitical evolution, and in this sense, the end of history. He published this argument in 1989, the beginning of the end of the Cold War, but because of China’s progress he is now suggesting it no longer applies.

What he is saying is that the notion of progress now gravitates, whether we like it or not, around what the Chinese experiment implies. Even for somebody from Mexico, where we also had a revolutionary experience, the significance of China is dramatic!

But the perhaps nationalistic requirement particular to the Shanghai Biennale has not been onerous for your team’s considerations?

For the complexities of the project here, no. Let me put it this way, the Mexican political classes are completely paranoid about how they will be seen overseas. I have not experienced that here. The question is what are the limits of discourse, which happens everywhere.

Regarding the curatorial team, you selected curators from Bogotá, Japan, and China. How did you bring that team together and what were the strengths you sought?

It’s very specific. María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, from Bogotá, had been following a line of inquiry about how natural societies are ordered. Yukie Kamiya, who is based in New York, brings a very strong dialogue about conflict, but she also knows many artists I had never heard of! Wang Weiwei knows the Shanghai art scene. I learnt from the mistakes of colleagues, of the dangers of parachuting in.

Avoiding the dangers of delivering a show with no understanding of the local complexities was a consideration?

There will always be something that you miss, but I hope that we present a positive agenda, while navigating a complex understanding of the present moment. The most contentious part of the project is the hope that by involving these people from the Western world, the show will be able to make more sense of things for people living here. One of my goals is that this event creates more possibilities in China. We are here to push the limits of discourse. And I hope it opens the eyes of the audience, politicians and artists to how important it is to develop the discourse of this place.

Lastly, I want to ask what you are doing about the wider program for the audience, given the theme of social transformation?

I can’t answer that. I can’t say more than that we will try. There are certain programs that will have a greater reach and that will connect more academic fields. But I would be a fraud if I said that I understand the business of getting to a general audience here, I don’t understand the place enough. I don’t think that the effect of cultural production should only be recorded in audience numbers, however. Things that have a bourgeois audience can still have an effect. Further education as a project should not be dismissed because it can have an impact on society.

The 2018 Shanghai Biennale opens November 10 and runs until March 10, 2019.

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