ZONAMACO EJES 2024
BOOTH EJ19

ZONAMACO, takes place from February 07 to 11, 2024 at Centro Citibanamex, in Mexico City.

ZⓈONAMACO EJES 2024 focuses on artists whose practices explore the powerful relationship between pleasure and politics. This section welcomes proposals from younger galleries, hybrid spaces and artist-run initiatives with presentations by one to three artists. EJES will showcase the many fascinating ways in which artists highlight the importance of care, love, leisure, intimacy, sexuality and play to inspire new collective ways of living that ensure pleasure for all.

In line with the conceptual construction of ZⓈONAMACO EJES 2024, Carmo Johnson Projects presents Alberto Pitta (Salvador - Bahia - Brazil, 1961) and MAHKU - Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (Jordão - Acre - Brazil, 2021).

Alberto Pitta

For Alberto Pitta, carnival is a form of political resistance. The meaning of Pitta's paintings and serigraphs carry the ancestral knowledge of Brazilian Afro-Yoruba culture and have been transferred to fabric, every carnival, for more than 40 years. Pitta tells stories through the symbols of the costumes created for the countless Afro-Bahian carnival blocks, managing to communicate with all people, irrelevant of class, race, literate or illiterate, fostering a provocative, political and joyful bond between his art and the population, which is why his presence is so respected and expected at every carnival.

The work Pitta will present at ZⓈONAMACO EJES 2024 carries the full force of the Afro-Bahian 2024 carnival. The two canvases exhibited at Ejes are a direct reinterpretation of the costumes Pitta created for the well known Cortejo Afro, his own Afro Bahian block, and Ilê Ayiê, the first and  seminal Afro Bahian block, for whom Pitta creates. Coincidently the timing couldn't be better, as 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Salvador's Afro-Bahian carnival, taking place from February 9th through 13th, in perfect synchronicity with the Zonamaco Ejes Project. 

MAHKU

MAHKU - Huni Kuin Artists Movement - operates as a bridge of communication and functions as an instrument of mediation between the visible and invisible worlds and their transmutation into images, resulting in paintings that are technologies of relationship between the Huni Kuin world and the contemporary art circuit. MAHKU translates visions, chants and miths from their practice with Ayhuasca rituals, into paintings.

While embodying the spirit of the jungle, they sell their paintings to buy land in the Amazon and, in this way, construct a new history for themselves, a history towards autonomy. Their paintings are a form of resistance, of vindication and protection of their own culture and their collective habitat.