For the first time, the Bienal de São Paulo will travel to Mexico and will be presented at the Museo Tamayo. The exhibition will be a synthesis of the original biennial, which will dialogue with the cultural, ecological and historical context of our country and of Latin America. The selection that will house the museum was made by curator Anna Roberta Goetz and comes from the 36th edition of the biennial, shown in São Paulo, Brazil, from September 2025 to January 2026.

The works in the original exhibition, entitled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, they raised affinities and divergences that open up interconnected stories of modernism. For her presentation in Mexico, the curator took abstraction and its political dimensions as a starting point, and brought into dialogue the work of artists from different generations. Goetz chose a set of works that relate to the complexity of abstraction in Mexican art history and to the history of the museum itself, whose founder, Rufino Tamayo, paved the way for a later generation, in particular the Generation of Rupture, which includes Gunther Gerzso and Manuel Felguérez, who moved from nationalist muralism to abstraction, international modernism and aesthetic freedom.

The exhibition in Mexico will include a group of works focused on abstraction, where abstraction is thought of as situated knowledge, as a carrier of memory and a translation of cosmologies. In addition, the exhibition will incorporate textile works, which make visible the links between human life, the ancentral and the spiritual world.

Other pieces will refer to the human figure and to the refusal of the body to be fixed through representation. The works in this nucleus are based on the idea that bodies exceed classifications based on race, gender, sexuality, physical capacity and social belonging.

Earth and water are themes explored by another group of works. In this regard, Goetz explains that bodies, landscapes and ecosystems are subject to interconnected regimes of ownership, extraction, displacement and control; he also points out that land and water are not passive funds, but rather living archives, territories in dispute and conditions of collective survival.

Through this selection of works, humanity emerges, Goetz points out, and it is manifested in the way in which we listen, remember, care for, resist and take responsibility for each other and for the worlds we inhabit and imagine. Humanity is practiced through the recognition of difference and interdependence, and through the creation of forms of coexistence without erasing the stories and asymmetries that shape our encounters.

Artists: Akinbode Akinbiyi, Alberto Pitta, Aline Baiana, Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos, Andrew Roberts, Antonio Társis, Behjat Sadr, Berenice Olmedo, Edival Ramosa, Ernest Cole, Forensic Architecture/Forensis, Forugh Farrokhzad, Gervane de Paula, Imran Mir, Juliana dos Santos, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Leo Asemota, Lidia Lisbôa, Malika Agueznay, Mao Ishikawa, Mohamed Melehi, Moses Patrício, Myrlande Constant, Sergio Soarez, Sharon Hayes and Théodore Diouf.

This exhibition is presented by the Museo Tamayo in collaboration with the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Anna Roberta Goetz.

The 36th Bienal de São Paulo was presented at Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo from September 2025 to January 2026. It was curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz, Thiago de Paula Souza and Keyna Eleison.

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Bienal de São Paulo. If created in 1951 and is the second oldest art biennial in the world, after the Venice Biennial, which emerged in 1895. The Bienal de São Paulo was founded by Italian-Brazilian businessman Ciccillo Matarazzo. Since 1957, the biennial has been presented in the pavilion that bears the name of its founder, in Ibirapuera Park. The biennial presents the work of artists from Brazil and other countries and is considered one of the most important exhibitions in Brazil. In 1962, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo was created and since then it has been in charge of organizing the exhibition.

The initial objective of the Bienal de São Paulo was to publicize contemporary art in Brazil, encouraging the country's incursion into the art scene in other metropolises and making the city of São Paulo an international art center. The biennial has brought Brazilian art closer to an international audience and vice versa. The international exhibitions have been organized by different curators.