María José Crespo: Screen Memories
2025-07-19 18:00 - 2025-08-30 17:00 UTC | MXCL BNL LAB, 6545 Greenleaf Ave, Whittier, CA, 90601
Screen Memories, a solo exhibition by María José Crespo, is an immersive, research-driven installation that explores Tijuana as a haunted city saturated with sensorial excess, systemic violence, and poetic resonance. This project proposes a counter-infrastructure through a speculative data center where ghosts, understood as social figures, lead us into fractured temporalities and hidden memory circuits. This “data center” stages a confrontation between institutional records, found archives, sensorial traces, and fictional artifacts, challenging the ways we construct and access history in a border town defined by control, surveillance, and erasure.
Screen Memories is curated by Rosela del Bosque as part of the MexiCali Biennial’s PARA/normal Borders Lab.
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Art Talk: María José Crespo & Rosela del Bosque
2025-08-22 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Join us for a dialogue between artist María José Crespo and curator Rosela del Bosque in regards to Screen Memories currently on view at MXCL BNL LAB. This free program invites the attendees to explore the exhibition through topics related to the border region, including surveillance assets and the otherworldly data centers that hold them.
If you follow a ghost in a border city, where does it lead you? In Screen Memories, the answer is: to a data center.
María José Crespo (b.1991) completed a BA in Fine Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana and a MA in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her research looks into the porous space between territory, language, limits, and the body, and how this space can be understood by extending the way they relate to each other as gestures in different materialities. By questioning how she inhabits certain boundaries as a woman, she is interested in studying remains and traces
that administrative powers leave behind in unclear territories.
Rosela del Bosque (Mexicali, 1997) is a curator, art historian, and professor. Her work explores ways of addressing ecological loss and degradation mediated by process-oriented artistic research, archives, and curatorial practice. She holds a BA in ArtHistory from Universidad de las Américas Puebla and a Master of Advanced Studies in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts. She currently serves as Associate Curator at Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Additionally, she is a curator at Planta Libre (Mexicali) and part of the Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado collaborative project.
Alongside curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar, she is co-curating the mid-career survey exhibition Ingrid Hernández, 20 años de arte under construction to be presented at Centro Cultural Tijuana. Additionally, she is a professor at the School of Arts, Mexicali UABC, and assistant curator of the next MexiCali Biennial edition PARA/normal Borders.
