Melanie Smith

Melanie Smith was born in Poole, England, in 1965. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Reading. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Mexico City, an experience that has profoundly influenced her practice. Her work has been marked by a sustained re-reading of the formal and aesthetic categories of the avant-garde and post-avant-garde movements, interrogated through the lens of heterotopias.

Her production is closely tied to an expanded understanding of modernity, maintaining a dialogue both with what this notion signifies within Latin America—particularly in Mexico—and with the implications this holds for her formal explorations as a critical moment within the aesthetic–political structure of modernity and late modernity.

In earlier works, she examined the aesthetic and political implications of multitudes, violence, and aberrant forms at the fringes of contemporaneity.

Her work has been exhibited widely in national and international institutions, including: PS1, New York; MoMA, New York; UCLA’s Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA, Boston; Tate Liverpool; Tate Modern, London; South London Gallery, London; CAMH, Houston; Milton Keynes; CCA, Vilnius; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museo de Arte de Lima; Museo Tamayo, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, and Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; and Museo de Monterrey.

In 2011 she represented Mexico at its national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale.