El mismo lugar, pero otro lugar conjures a paradox of perception and an invitation into feminist fabulation: how a site, a memory, a body, a presence, or a form may appear familiar yet remain radically transformed and unruly, alive with latent potential. This group exhibition gathers works by Julieta Beltrán, Adela Goldbard, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Diana Sofia Lozano, Stephanie Lucchese, Daniela Ramírez, Chaveli Sifre, and Lucía Vidales, in dialogue with a selection of sketches by Remedios Varo, to reflect on ideas of dislocation, mutation, rupture, and reinvention across material, political, and metaphysical terrains.
The participating artists share an affinity for speculative visual languages—ranging from surrealist methodologies to ritualistic assemblage, narrative distortion, and political storytelling. Through their varied practices, they reimagine the porous borders between natural worlds, the sacred and the profane, and the mythic and the historical. As a whole, the selection of works traces the contours of a feminist imaginary—one that reclaims intuition, dream, desire, and magic as bountiful modes of world-building.
Several works trace a return to the body—not as a fixed vessel, but as a haunted, hybrid, and resisting entity. From Chaveli Sifre’s alchemical transmutations of symbols into spiritual revolt, to Julieta Beltrán’s corporeal narratives of self-construction and personal memory, the body becomes a site of both wound and wonder. In dialogue with these explorations, Lucía Vidales’ painting stages a decomposing figure in lurid, melancholic ecologies, where pleasure and decay intermingle in a dance of tragic beauty: undone yet luminous, tragic yet alive.
Other works in the exhibition foreground ecological, cosmic, and mystic concerns. Daniela Ramírez invokes the psychedelic properties of the ololiúqui flower to map cosmic interrelations between the plant, celestial bodies, and the spirit. Diana Sofia Lozano’s mutant flora camouflage themselves from imperial sight, invoking the insurgent intelligence of plants. Adela Goldbard’s pyrotechnic works ignite the volcanic and the revolutionary, linking traditional craft with histories of resistance in Mexico, transforming pyrotechnics into both an archival practice and a pledge for a more sustainable future.
Cynthia Gutiérrez’s subtle but powerful interventions offer a poetics of ruin and reconstruction. Meanwhile, Stephanie Lucchese conjures strange gardens of delight—sensuous tableaux where lush bodies and edible forms spiral through theatrical fictions, and desire curdles into a portal to an uncanny world of her own making.
Threaded throughout the exhibition, the presence of Remedios Varo—whose work seamlessly merged science, magic, and the subconscious—serves as a spectral companion. Her drawings provide a generative reference point, illuminating how artistic experimentation can conjure alternate cosmologies and feminist futures.
Together, the works in El mismo lugar, pero otro lugar create a visual grammar that unsettles linear narratives and opens portals into spaces where memory mutates and transformation persists. Here, place is not a destination, but a field of ongoing translation—a landscape where the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes a new kind of home.
Paulina Ascencio Fuentes
Lucía Vidales (1986) is a Mexican artist based in Monterrey, Mexico. Vidales’s work is concerned, above all, with painting. The body is recurrent as figure, as the painted gaze, and as the painting itself. Fragmented limbs often seem to emerge from, or sink into, the luminous or shadowy depths of her painterly surfaces. For Vidales, painting can transform time, our relationship with matter and how we experience our own bodies. She is interested in a liminal and polyvalent use of color and a fluid relationship with drawing. Her work is informed by the consequences of historical and colonial imaginaries as they continue to impact actual bodies and the body of painting itself. The beings that populate her paintings suggest the potential for confrontation, but seldom follow through. Instead, they play with humor or anxiety, or seek consolation from ancient wounds.
Vidales is an Art Professor at University of Monterrey (UDEM) in Mexico. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a BA in Visual Arts from "La Esmeralda" National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL); and has been awarded the Jóvenes Creadores grant three times by the Ministry of Culture in Mexico. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Museo Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico (2023-24); PROXYCO Gallery, New York (2021); Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City (2021); PEANA, Monterrey, Mexico (2021); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2020); Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City (2019); among others. Group exhibitions include: The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art has commissioned a large-scale installation by Vidales for its ninth annual Atrium Project (2024-25), 15th FEMSA Biennial, Guanajuato, Mexico (2024); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2023); Sapar Contemporary [at Piero Atchugarry Gallery], Miami (2020-21); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2020); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019).
Adela Goldbard (1979) is a Mexican transdisciplinary artist-scholar based in Providence, Rhode Island, and Mexico City. Goldbard's work depicts the results of her research on how radical community performances can subvert hegemonic narratives, while also exploring the transformative potential of violence and destruction as aesthetic tools in the resistance against power. She is especially interested in how collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation.
Goldbard is an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and fellow of the National System of Art Creators (SNCA) from Mexico’s Endowment for the Arts. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a BA in Hispanic Literature from the National University of Mexico (UNAM). She has had over 25 solo shows including a mid-career retrospective at Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City (2024). Recent art commissions include a pyrotechnic performance for the Pomona College Museum of Art (Getty Institute's initiative PST, 2017), a pyrotechnic play with/for the Mexican community of La Villita, Chicago (University of Illinois, 2019-20), and a socially-engaged art project with/for the P'urhépecha community of Arantepacua (FEMSA Biennial, 2020-21). She is currently working on the post-production of her opera prima (a participatory film set in the Peruvian Andes, created in collaboration with the Quechua communities of Chumbivilcas), on a commission for the Boston Public Art Triennial and on three solo shows taking place in 2025.
Remedios Varo (1908-1963) was a Spanish artist who became a naturalized Mexican. Varo's work represents the idea that "the dream world and the real world are the same," as she alchemically combined traditional techniques, Surrealist methods, and mystical philosophic inquiry into visionary dreamscapes. She was raised in Madrid, where she learned observational drawing from her father and later trained as a painter. In the 1930s, she moved to Barcelona and Paris, which offered liberation from academic painting and family expectations, exposing Varo to modernist thinkers and a close association with Surrealist artists. Her intimacy with the group is evident in an untitled 1935 collage created with Esteban Francés, Oscar Domínguez and Marcel Jean using the technique known as cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse).
In 1941, Varo emigrated to Mexico, fleeing fascism in France and Spain. There, she built a new creative life among other Mexican and expatriate artists and intellectuals, becoming especially close with Surrealist Leonora Carrington and connecting with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Octavio Paz, Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, among others. Varo’s first works from this period reflect the trauma of war and displacement, but by 1947, when she decided to stay in Mexico, her practice was flourishing. Her drawings and paintings during this time explore otherworldly narrative scenes characterized by a protagonist (often female) encountering supernatural forces. Like the magician in her painting, Varo aspired to reveal hidden metaphysical wonders through close observation and meticulous technique.
By the time of Varo’s death in 1963, the artist had created over 500 works, mostly produced in Mexico. Her work has been exhibited and acquired by museums such as MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), among others.
Diana Sofía Lozano (1992) is a Colombian artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Lozano's work uses the language of botanical hybrids; the naturally occurring, genetically modified, and the imagined. She has built an original inventory of large-scale compounded horticultural specimens through sculpture, installation, and drawing. Lozano works with braided steel, colored resin clay, hand-dyed wool, and fabric to create other-worldly plants that leave traces of spores and mirrored spoors. The enlarged petals, roots, stems, pistils, thorns, and leaves are reminiscent of the detailed botanical models on display in natural science museums. Still, their deviant forms appeal further to lusus naturae (freak of nature) than scientific accuracy. The artist presents biomimicry as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the politics of difference. She is interested in the deconstruction of botanical taxonomic failures in order to reveal and redefine the boundaries of colonial identificatory practices and geopolitical borders.
Lozano holds a MFA in Sculpture from Yale University and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her recent solo exhibitions include: PROXYCO Gallery (2023), Home Gallery (2021), Deli Gallery (2019), Company Gallery (2018) in New York; Parallel, Oaxaca, Mexico (2022); among others. Group exhibitions include: Wave Hill Gardens (2024, 2019), Rachel Uffner Gallery (2021) in New York; Hiroshi Kamei Collection, Arto Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan (2023); Örebro Konsthall, Örebro, Sweden (2022); Capsule Gallery, Shanghai, China (2019); New Image Art, Los Angeles (2019); Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco (2018); Casa Prado, Barranquilla, Colombia (2013).
Daniela Ramírez (1991) is a Mexican visual artist based in Guadalajara, Mexico. Ramirez's research incorporates Latin American and gender studies, with a primary interest in the historical elements of the materials she works with, as well as the social and cultural implications that run through them. She uses various media such as sculpture, drawing, installation, painting, and video to create possible narratives that subvert the everyday nature of the material and its products. Recently, she conducted a study on sugarcane and its introduction to the American continent.
Ramírez holds a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Guanajuato (2015). She made an academic stay at the Fluminense Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2014). She is co-director of the independent interior space 2.1, and part of the Writers' Circle of Jalisco and of the FAENA working group. Her work has been exhibited in various spaces such as Lateral Espacio and López Portillo Museum in Guadalajara, Mexico; Salón ACME, Mexico City; Jesús Gallardo Gallery, León, Guanajuato, Mexico; Carlos Magno Paschoal Cultural Center, Río de Janeiro, Brazil; among others.
Julieta Beltrán Lazo (1991) is a Mexican visual artist based in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Chicago. Beltrán's work revises and re-imagines history. Through embroidering, painting, drawing and writing, she examines her relationship to the celebrations and grievances that accompany Mexico’s recent history, approaching them from an affective subjectivity. Her work mediates between lived experiences, fantasies and fears, news outlets, family archives, and popular culture.
Beltrán Lazo is a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025), and holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited both individually and collectively within Mexico, Perú, USA and Europe. Currently, she is the recipient of the Higher Education Scholarship from the Jumex Art Foundation (2023-25).
Cynthia Gutiérrez (1978) is a Mexican artist based in Guadalajara, Mexico. Gutiérrez’s work is articulated from an understanding of sculpture beyond the medium. Her approaches to three-dimensionality —through different supports— arise from a critical strategy that seeks to question and test the vulnerability and stability of that which is structural, whether at a physical, conceptual or political level. Supported by different philosophical references, the query about the future vibrates in a deep layer in her work. The relationship between past and present, between the institutional as epitome of power and control structures, as well as the different forms of political representation, inhabit her work to set up a dialogue that allows us, if not to resort to answers, to at least act from an awareness of the tensions we face. In this way, the construction of memory, of national identity, the idea of progress or failure, the cyclicality of collapse, the apparatus of legitimization, and its link with art and culture are frequently addressed in her pieces to interrogate and test our ability to discern and negotiate the public, political and social space.
Gutiérrez holds a BA in Visual Arts oriented to sculpture from the University of Guadalajara, and has been awarded the Jóvenes Creadores grant by the Ministry of Culture in Mexico. Her solo exhibitions include: Plataforma de Arte Contemporáneo, Guadalajara, México (2024); Cuadro22, Chur, Switzerland; Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico City (2023, 2019, 2016, 2014); Museo Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico (2022); Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2022); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA (2017); Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Zapopan, Mexico (2011); among others. Group exhibitions include: Venice Biennale, Italy; Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives, Ukraine; Berlin Biennale, Germany; Museo Raúl Anguiano (MURA), Guadalajara Mexico (2023); Centro de las Artes / CONARTE, Monterrey, Mexico (2023); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico (2023); Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, Oklahoma City, USA (2022); Gare Saint Sauveur, Lille, France (2019); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2018); XIII Bienal FEMSA, Museo Rafael Coronel, Zacatecas, Mexico (2018).
Stephanie Lucchese (1991) is a Brazilian artist based in New York. Lucchese's work is focused on painting and drawing, creating fictions in scenes that allow a peek into an invented universe where forms, fruits, plants and figures interact in constant movement, devouring themselves as time remains still. She works from drawings to paintings with no photographic references. The result is the theatrical artificiality of a surreal light quality, and the unnerving feeling that although everything here looks edible – from the fruits up to the people, something is off. Inspired by medieval tapestries, the drama of religious art, the logical systems of sci-fi, love songs, witchcraft history, as well as pop culture elements from the 90s and 2000s and biographical details, the artist makes paintings of velvety quality and peculiar haunting.
Lucchese holds a MA in Art History and a BFA in Visual Arts from the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado. Her solo exhibitions include: Yehudi Hollander-Pappi (2025) and Projeto Vênus (2023) in São Paulo, Brazil. Group exhibitions include: Yehudi Hollander-Pappi, Espaço Alto (2025), Auroras (2018) and Galeria Jaqueline Martins (2017) in São Paulo, Brazil; and Abri Mars (2025), Mama Projects (2024), IRL (2021), The Hole (2019), SVA Summer Residency Open Studios Exhibition (2019) in New York.
Chaveli Sifre (1987) is a German artist based in Berlin. Sifre's multidisciplinary practice explores healing traditions, the hierarchy of the senses, botany, and the belief systems that shape them. Through installations, sculptures, paintings, and participatory performances, Sifre investigates the intersections of science, spirituality, ritual and healing modalities aiming to recover their long-lost connections. Through her immersive and sensorial installations, Sifre invites audiences to reconsider the hierarchy of the senses in order to generate a world transforming tool.
Her solo exhibitions include: Kultur Büro Elisabeth, Berlin, Germany (2024); San Juan 721, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2024); LISTE Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland (2023); and Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2023). Other notable projects include Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2022); and Underneath the Arches, Naples, Italy (2024). Group exhibitions include: the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin; Martin Gropius Bau and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan; Natur Nach Humboldt at Botanisches Garten, Berlin; Welt Bilder at Salon Sophie Charlotte, Berlin; We Didn’t Ask Permission, We Just Did It at Mishkin Gallery, New York; An Uncertain State at Centre Clark, Montreal; and Seen but Unnoticed, Beautiful Soup at De Appel, Amsterdam. She has also participated in major events such as the "Flow States, La Trienal 2024” at El Museo del Barrio in New York City, La Trienal Poligráfica in San Juan and the Bienal Tropical del Caribe.