04 — 17 FEB 2026
HEADQUARTERS:
Bahía Magdalena 88, Verónica Anzúres, Miguel Hidalgo, 11300 Mexico City, CDMX
Art as a technology of consciousness
Umbrales is not a group exhibition in the traditional sense, nor a fair understood solely as a market, nor a festival reduced to a program. Umbrales is a field of transit. A space of intersection where the artwork ceases to be merely an object and becomes experience, presence, and passage.
The threshold is, by definition, an unstable territory. One doesn't belong entirely to one side or the other. It is the instant before transformation. In this sense, Thresholds is conceived as a constellation of individual exhibitions that, by coming together under the same curatorial vision, activate an expanded reading of contemporary art as a sensitive technology, as a device capable of modifying perceptual, emotional, and cognitive states.
Here, art doesn't illustrate concepts. It embodies them. It doesn't represent ideas. It gives them form.
Here, art doesn't illustrate concepts. It embodies them. It doesn't represent ideas. It gives them form.
The axis that articulates
Thresholds stems from a clear conviction: art has historically been one of the earliest technologies of human consciousness. Before rational language, the scientific system, or normative codification, art functioned as a means of relating to the invisible, the symbolic, and the unspoken.
In Umbrales, this dimension is reactivated through contemporary practices that work with matter, time, the body, energy, light, sound, and perception. It is not about spiritualizing art, but about recognizing its operative power, its capacity to produce internal shifts, open fissures in habitual perception, and generate experiences that are not exhausted by mere observation.
Each of the artists gathered here works, from different languages, with this idea of activation, understanding the work as an experiential threshold.
Presence and material experience as passage
In Umbrales, matter does not function as a passive support, but as an active agent. Painting, sculpture, installation, sound, performative gesture, and energetic vibration operate as surfaces of contact between the viewer and something larger than themselves.
The aesthetic experience thus shifts from the merely visual plane to an embodied experience. The viewer's body is not external to the work, but is permeated by it. The work takes place in space, but also, and fundamentally, within the person who inhabits it.
This emphasis on presence restores to art its ritual dimension, not as archaic repetition, but as a contemporary act of meaning.
HOW TO ENJOY AN EXHIBITION
INSTRUCTIONS FOR A COMPLETE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
Don't try to see everything at once. The journey is also part of the experience.
Before entering a room, take a brief pause and feel your body in the space.
In the first tour, it allows the experience to happen without mediation or records.
Not just with your eyes. Observe how you react physically and emotionally.
Stand in front of a work of art even if at first you don't "understand" anything.
Sounds, silence, and the distance between works also communicate.
Confusion is sometimes a sign that something is changing.
It allows sensations to emerge before immediate ideas.
Your experience is valid, even if you don't know what to call it.
A second viewing reveals other layers and nuances.
Let the work settle before performing it, not during.
The aesthetic experience is not a test: it is an encounter.