Polina Stroganova co-curated Dancing Meridians, an interdisciplinary exhibition that brought together contemporary collectible design and visual art within a historic Mario Pani apartment on Mexico City’s Reforma Avenue. Developed in collaboration with ALRATITOstudio, the project was conceived as a site-responsive intervention that challenged conventional modes of display by activating domestic space as an experiential platform. Stroganova played a key role in articulating the curatorial concept and overseeing the spatial narrative of the exhibition, which featured works by 22 international artists and designers.
Stroganova’s contribution focused on fostering dialogue between material practices and architectural context, emphasizing relational aesthetics and the dissolution of boundaries between design and contemporary art. Through a carefully choreographed installation strategy, the project underscored the importance of environmental interplay and sensorial engagement. Her curatorial direction helped position Dancing Meridians as a critical and playful response to modernist legacy, while also contributing to the cultural reactivation of an iconic architectural site.
It has been the special genius of our century to investigate things in relation to their context, to come to see the context as formative on the thing, and finally, to see the context as a thing itself. (Brian O’Doherty. Inside the White Cube)
Dancing Meridians is set as a spatial choreography, a multidisciplinary display that incorporates the visual, the haptic and the sensorial. The show brings together 22 international designers and artists in an iconic Mario Pani flat from 1956, that was then set out to open the “Door” to Mexican Urban Modernity.
Quite in the spirit of the architect, Dancing Meridians plays with its environment; the architecture that it inhabits, its materials, its light, and its beautiful imperfections.
In this show, the works on view intuitively connect through their textures, spatial discourses, materiality, feeling of gravity versus agility, rigid forms and fragile shapes. Instead of “isolating” the individual artworks from any “alien” environment, as has been the mission of any classical white cube throughout the 20th century, this show deliberately shifts away from this notion and challenges the idea of interplay and context. In fact, the display of each room is enhanced through additional museographic elements, such as plants, draped textiles and crates. It is a show that needs to be experienced, danced through, in order to explore all of its playful, fluid parallels between the lines of a plant, a hanging lamp or falling hair. You might discover a snake in the jungle or beautifully random cracks in Pani’s walls being echoed in some of the objects on display.
Ultimately, we live and interact with everything that surrounds us. Let’s emphasize the characteristic of each piece through its relationship to the other and generate that third space.
Participating Artists: Aitor Eguia; Anna Virnich; Arturo Hernández Alcázar; Cada Estudio; Daphane Park; Deceres; Edaa; Ente; Federico Stefanovich; Galia Eibenschutz; Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann; Greenmeme; Jerónimo Sainz de Agüero; Julius Heinemann; Lili Cortina; Martin Soto Climent; Mutable Studio; MX Atelier; Randi Mates; Shiho Amano; Tracy Wilkinson; Yvonne Venegas
Images: Courtesy of the artists