The Brooklyn Rail

In 1944, Frida Kahlo painted The Broken Column (La Columna Rota), which shows the artist with her chest cleaved at the midline, flayed to reveal an Ionic column where there should be a spine. Evidently in pieces and improbably stacked, its volutes nevertheless prop up her chin, while a prosthetic armature holds the body erect. Nails puncture her skin but do not draw blood, though the opalescent droplets that rain from her eyes anyhow suggest the imperfect mechanism of displacement. Even among Kahlo’s self-portraits steeped in Catholic (or pseudo-Catholic) references, it is an icon. In a substitution of another kind, it appears in low-resolution on a small monitor in curator Francisco Berzunza’s Columna Rota/Broken Column, where the absent painting—absurdly livestreamed from the nearby Dolores Olmedo Museum, where it remains affixed to the wall—shapes the exhibition. As Berzunza writes of his first encounter with Kahlo’s image: “The metaphor of a ruined structure—one that supports both people and buildings alike—resonated as I thought about my own career as a curator, which has largely gone unnoticed; my romantic life, which feels like a perpetual longing; and my nature as a severe critic.”

Columna Rota/Broken Column sprawls across the chronically defunded and intermittently shuttered Museum of Mexico City, the Church of Jesús Nazareno, and into streets that also happen to be near the site of Kahlo’s incapacitating accident. It is a massive undertaking comprising historical, recent, and newly commissioned work, with over 125 contributors to the show and catalog. It is also the third in an unapologetically personal trilogy (after You to Me, Me to You, 2023, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town, and From Dreams You Wake Up, 2024, Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico City). Following explorations of dreams, friendship, love, and loneliness, it thematizes, again in Berzunza’s words, “rejection as a structuring force.” Built on representations of pain, Kahlo’s vertebral iconography comes to serve a metonymic but also talismanic role, predicated on defiance. But however catalytic, the mention finally proves superfluous to Berzunza’s intervention, which is less residually procedural—less chronically self-involved—than this mode of confessionalism would suggest. And anyhow, the checklist confirms the tenacity of community, with friends including Iñaki Bonillas, Dexter Dalwood, and Alfredo Jaar recurring as key interlocutors across the series.

If soliciting affect is the point, the show produces it through anecdote but more so through conceptual recognitions of implacable structures. A shifting array of targets includes (but is not limited to) the academy, curatorial orthodoxy, settler colonialism, the state and its healthcare system, and normalizations of history. Beyond its proximity to the current seat of government—political rallies have occupied the ground floor since the show’s opening—the museum marks the location of Hernán Cortés and Montezuma II’s fateful meeting. In a visible act of incorporation, an Aztec serpent monolith is embedded in the palace façade; given the appropriation of the building’s architecture by Berzunza and contributing artists, its presence feels far from incidental to the project. Even more explicitly, though, the building’s entryway is crowned by a billboard-like LED screen playing Jaar’s This is not America (1987) above an Aztec monolith visible from the street, where the urgency of its hemispheric imagination resonates anew. “This is Not America” it reads against an illuminated map of the United States.

Just inside, José Rojas has buried a site-specific painting (2025) under a grate where he entombed it with a submerged remnant of a partial column. It serves as a reminder of the regular deconstruction and repurposing of colonial buildings and—differently catastrophic—of the shifting ground level produced by this former lakebed sunk within a volcanic zone. Above it, The Soft Motherland (2025), a giant, ceiling-covering painting jerry-rigged to the central courtyard’s perimeter by José Eduardo Barajas makes a canopy of pain: a mash-up of scenes of ecological disaster, quotes from Mexican muralism and graffiti, and garlands of thorns. The imagery is pointed but abstract, its seepage warped by scale and distance. (Even so, those patriotic rallies happening under it are hard to fathom.) From the second floor its resolution shifts, if not its scale, to a city clearly collapsing in on itself. On the stairs in between, one encounters Teresa Margolles’s flurry of bubbles emitted by a contraption emitting them from a rotating accumulation of toy wands (2003/2025)—a perfect emblem of fragility with soap that once washed corpses of the disappeared in Mexican morgues.

The double-take functions as a kind of psychic establishing shot for a show that thereafter goes all in for feeling. Beyond a wallpaper motif of blood boiling (courtesy Slavs and Tatars, 2025), Bonillas’s vertical color photograph in three parts, Orphan Column (2025), centers a column resurrected from fragments at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, in what is now Turkey. Destroyed by Christians in 401 CE, it is in Bonillas’s care the pedestal for a stork nest, still harboring life. Then comes another kind of exhumation, one of many of Berzunza’s condemnation of art’s canons: a mini-show within the show of Zimbabwean modernist Thomas Mukarobgwa, who is presented here with six paintings of interpenetrating colors that also happen to be bodies and landscapes. (These range from the 1960s to the 1990s, by which time his early notoriety—he was highlighted by Alfred Barr and Tristan Tzara—had long since waned). In an exhibition deliberately lacking an argument but modeling strategy for commitment, Berzunza’s orientation to recovery is a through-line, ruins aplenty above ground as well as harbored in those subterranean cavities.

Indeed, further in, Tamiji Kitagawa’s Two Donkeys (1929), shown in Mexico for the first time since he returned to Japan nearly a century ago, bespeaks the burdens of labor and, in this context, the ensuing grief of dismissal. It presides over the room with the mediated Kahlo—that little television broadcasting the inaccessible painting from across town—together with Lola Álvarez Bravo’s (ca. 1930s) photographs of children in the care of a school for the blind (and hence the postrevolutionary state). The latter unfurls across a wall facing Ramon Saturnino’s don’t speak; don’t talk (2025), a makeshift but impenetrable wall of crowd-control fences recalling minimalist monoliths but also those police tactics regularly deployed just north at the Zócalo and further so at the US-Mexico border. In this case, pointedly against the censorship and restricted visibility that domesticated them indoors at the demands of local authorities, they contain the exact number of panels needed to encircle the building in which they wait to be otherwise operationalized.

In what might be the clearest instance of the stakes of Berzunza’s recoveries, the show ends with a gallery introducing the work of Máximo Pacheco, Diego Rivera’s assistant, and an important muralist in his own right. An Indigenous artist of Otomi heritage, he worked alongside Rivera making paintings for the Mexican Revolution in the Ministry of Education (1922–28). Most are now lost, so we see photos of them extant by no less than Tina Modotti. Yet some still exist in a primary school, dormant and decaying further as the government refuses petitions to restore them (Berzunza is leading the charge to make this happen). In incredible scenes of schoolyard play and civic lessons, Pacheco envisioned the school and the congregation of a broader society: some feature agriculture, fishing and swimming in the nearby lake; others highlight the pleasures of sports, music, and food. The militia appears, but so, too, a classroom-spanning vision of a rainbow with figures and dogs walking toward it. The very fact of its presence extends the show and its implications. At times seething and accusatory, it is also, in the end, plaintive.