Ayón’s imagery emerges from her sustained investigation of the Abakuá secret society, an Afro-Cuban brotherhood traditionally restricted to men. At the center of her reinterpretation is Sikán, the female figure of the foundational myth. Ayón’s decision to place Sikán at the heart of her visual universe is not merely an iconographic choice: it becomes a way of questioning the patriarchal structure of the tradition itself.

The works are visually difficult to forget. Their restricted palette of black, white, and grey produces an atmosphere that feels simultaneously ceremonial and ominous. Yet the power of these images does not depend on spectacle. It lies in their surfaces. Ayón’s mastery of collagraphy—built through matrices assembled from collaged materials—allows textures to become almost tactile, giving bodies, animals, patterns, and architectural forms an uncanny physical presence. The technique is not simply a means of representation; it becomes part of the meaning of the work.

What makes the exhibition particularly compelling is the tension between revelation and concealment. The Abakuá myth had traditionally been transmitted orally, while Ayón transformed it into a visual language without reducing its sense of secrecy. Her figures often appear suspended between ritual and psychological drama, as if they belonged to a world whose rules remain inaccessible to the viewer.

The title “Myth and Disobedience” points precisely toward this contradiction. Ayón enters a predominantly male symbolic system and reconfigures it from within. At the same time, her practice emerged during the profound social and political crisis Cuba experienced in the 1990s, when art could function as a space for resistance against marginalization, fear, and censorship.

MALBA’s concise presentation ultimately works because it leaves room for the images to retain their ambiguity. “Myth and Disobedience” does not explain Ayón’s world so much as place us before it; and asks us to look longer.

Originally conceived in 1976 through the collaboration between Antonio Berni and Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos, the project reunited two radically different artistic sensibilities around a surprisingly coherent theme: the myths people construct to explain suffering, hope, luck, and death. The Fortabat exhibition revisits this remarkable encounter without reducing it to a nostalgic reconstruction. Instead, it reveals how these works continue to resonate within contemporary culture, where old rituals coexist comfortably with modern skepticism.

At the heart of the exhibition stands Berni's monumental “La Difunta Correa”, an installation that transcends painting by incorporating the visual language of popular devotion. Bottles of water, crutches, horseshoes, photographs, and countless ex-votos accumulate before the figure, transforming the gallery into something resembling both a shrine and a social archive. Berni does not mock faith, nor does he romanticize it. Instead, he exposes the fragile intersection where desperation becomes belief and collective imagination acquires physical form. The work remains one of the most compelling reflections on Argentine popular religiosity produced in the twentieth century.

What ultimately distinguishes “Creencias y supersticiones de siempre” is its refusal to separate high art from popular culture. Miracles, curses, relics, and sacred objects are presented not as relics of a forgotten past but as living expressions of collective psychology. The exhibition suggests that every society invents narratives capable of making the inexplicable bearable, and that artists are uniquely equipped to reveal the structures hidden beneath those narratives.

Nearly fifty years after its original conception, the exhibition feels unexpectedly contemporary. In an age still shaped by uncertainty, conspiracy, ritual, and symbolic thinking, its central question remains unresolved: perhaps superstition has never truly disappeared—it has merely changed its language.

Born in the Colombian Amazon and trained from childhood as a sabedor within the Nonuya tradition, Rodríguez spent decades preserving knowledge that had always existed orally. Forced to leave his territory in the 1990s, he began drawing from memory, reconstructing the forest tree by tree, leaf by leaf. Over the years, this practice evolved into one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary Latin American art. The exhibition at MALBA, organized by MASP and curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Leandro Muniz, brings together a substantial selection of these works, spanning more than three decades.

The title refers to the mythic Tree of Abundance, a primordial image present in numerous Indigenous cosmologies. In Rodríguez’s hands, however, mythology never appears as allegory or fantasy. It is embedded within the materiality of plants, rivers, seasons, and cycles. His forests are not landscapes in the Western sense; they are systems of relationships. Species coexist according to rhythms of flowering, harvesting, flooding, and migration. Nothing is isolated. Every form belongs to a larger living structure.

The exhibition gathers an extensive list of artists, from Nan Goldin to Jorge Macchi and Ana Gallardo, without forcing them into a unified discourse. Rather than illustrating “farewell” as a theme, the works hover around it, touching on migration, absence, and emotional dislocation from oblique angles. This indirectness is one of the show’s strongest decisions. It avoids the didactic trap that often weakens exhibitions built on affective concepts.

Fischer’s curatorial approach treats space as an active medium. The installation emphasizes silence and pause, allowing the viewer’s body to register gaps as much as presences. There is a persistent sense of delay, as if each work arrives slightly too late or leaves too soon. This temporal dislocation becomes the exhibition’s real subject. The notion of farewell is not staged as an event but as a condition that stretches across time, dissolving any clear before and after.


One of the most compelling moments appears in the inclusion of audiovisual work such as Matilde Marín’s “Travesía”, where migration is rendered through a sequence of faces suspended between departure and arrival. The absence of language intensifies the ambiguity: these figures do not tell their stories, they carry them. The piece resonates with the broader curatorial logic, where meaning is never fixed but constantly deferred.

What ultimately defines “Difícil decir adiós” is its refusal to resolve the emotional tension it evokes. The exhibition does not offer closure, nor does it aestheticize loss into something consumable. Instead, it constructs a perceptual field in which viewers must negotiate their own position in relation to absence. In this sense, the show is less about saying goodbye than about inhabiting the impossibility of doing so.

It is an exhibition that trusts the intelligence of its audience. Not everything is explained, and that is precisely where it gains its weight.

Nicolas Villaume

Villaume, a National Geographic Society–supported photographer with decades of environmental archive behind him, has long resisted reducing the natural world to mere spectacle. What emerges in Glaciares Andinos is a subtle but sustained critique of our visual habits: the ice that dominates each frame is not the aloof subject of tourist gaze but a living, breathing surface undergoing transformation. In this sense, the show thinks with its material as much as about it: the glacier is both motif and actor.

This formal choice (to move from the static photograph to immersive projection) underscores the exhibition’s didactic intent without ever lapsing into didacticism. The visuals are punctuated by testimonies from Andean community members and environmental specialists, a narrative thread that challenges the viewer to situate aesthetic experience alongside socio-ecological urgency. These voices anchor the sublime landscapes in lived realities, where ice melt is not an abstract statistic but a material crisis already reshaping lives and water regimes across the Andes.

There is a compelling humility in the exhibition’s structure: rather than overwhelm with data or moralizing rhetoric, Glaciares Andinos opens a space for reflection where art and climate science intersect. It insists that beauty does not absolve responsibility, and that our visual economy must evolve if we are to apprehend ecological change with the seriousness it demands. In Buenos Aires, far from the high peaks themselves, this exhibition relocates the Andes into our collective imagination; not as distant backdrops, but as urgent aesthetic and ethical terrains.

Organized by the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and presented with works drawn from major collections including the Roger Wright Collection, Malba, and Costantini, this exhibition, the most extensive of its kind in Argentina, gathers over 120 works by some fifty artists whose practices intersected Pop, New Figuration, and political engagement.

The visual language is defiantly surreal. Eleven freshly minted canvases dominate the space—one is colossal, depicting a funeral car in ominous grandeur. Characters appear suspended between roles (heroes, spectres, objects) never fully legible. In “Conversación”, figures face each other without meeting the viewer’s gaze, rupturing narrative continuity and generating an antiseptic, strangely cold interaction. The disjunctions, like hat beside dragon, sofa next to seminudista, emphasize a deliberate unease. Bencardino uses distortion as aesthetic choice, as she “recoils from literal flatness,” probing “the spectral life of objects” and questioning binaries like good and evil.

This anticlassical approach extends to the installation itself, recalling an immersive club or cinema, with purple carpets and walls that envelop visitors in a nocturnal mood. The staging, simultaneously convivial and uncanny, mirrors the paintings’ oscillation between familiarity and the fantastical.

Interwoven in the exhibition is a video monologue, “Los sueños están rotos”, through which Bencardino probes influences ranging from surrealism to magical thinking, articulating an urgent desire to forge images that shatter complacent, totalizing narratives. She challenges the passivity induced by AI-generated imagery (“infinite images, infinite answers… what if it only anesthetizes us?”), reclaiming imagination as a terrain of rebellion and shared dreaming.

Technically, her brushwork favors gestural fluidity over precision, reflecting her non-binary identity and rejecting rigid forms. The material presence of paint, its viscous gestures, layered textures; works in concert with her themes: uncertainty, liminality, multiplicity.

Bencardino’s art positions itself at the threshold of perception. It asks not what we see, but what we feel when we see, and how this sensation reconfigures how we live—and collectively dream. In an era haunted by literal and metaphorical diseases—polarization, alienation—the exhibition stakes a claim for the imagination as a radical frontier.

At “El desentierro del diablo”, the devil is less a figure than an impulse, the drive to unearth, disturb, and re‑enchant. That impulse, beautifully disruptive, arrives at MALBA with a roar. This is a debut that doesn’t merely occupy institutional space; it excavates it, channeling the subterranean energies of the psyche onto the gallery’s floors and walls.