LA CLINICA

About us

La Clinica is an exhibition and project space at the intersection of local and international practices.

Located at C. Macedonio Alcalá 808, Centro 68000 Oaxaca, Mexico. This corner of Oaxaca was the first-private-medical-clinic in the city. Our curatorial framework and program is shaped around this heritage. We produce residencies, exhibitions, artist talks, performances, and others. The process of diagnosing informs how we understand research and making.
Within our curatorial framework we find ourselves transitioning from the inert objectivity of western medical diagnosing (the linear assessment of a maladie that is meant to return the productive-body back to its state of capital production) and into creating modes of showing for deeply subjective and situated practices.

Trayectory

Before being an art space, La Clínica, under the name of 'Santo Domingo de Guzmán' operated as a conventional health clinic. La Clínica Santo Domingo de Guzmán was founded on September 27, 1982 by a conglomerate of doctors, among them Dr. Ramón Jiménez Caballero. Back then this was the first private-medical-clinic in Oaxaca city. The transition from health center to art center happened at the end of 2021 after almost two years of the covid-19 pandemic which led to this shift of operations at Clinica Santo Domingo de Guzmán. Our curatorial framework and program are shaped around this heritage. The process of diagnosing informs how we understand research and exhibition-making.

Under the leadership of the former director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Oaxaca (MACO), Ramón Jiménez Cuen also known as rame CUEN, La Clinica established itself as an influential exhibition space and artistic residency. The first exhibition at La Clinica, Elementos Vitales, put together by Masa gallery and curator Suh Wu at La Clinica, showed works by late Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Although many of Mendieta's works were produced in Oaxaca they had never been exhibited in Oaxaca.
        In the past 50 years the ecological and cultural landscape of Oaxaca has transformed radically. The water creek which once floated Mendieta's body has dried, peripheries of the city keep shrinking due to wildfires and mining, while costs of living and inequality keeps growing. This puts into perspective the importance of contemporary exhibition space in the city where temporary visitors can become acquainted with lasting realities. Acting upon local struggles, and shifting our attention into ecologies and territory as maladies remédiables.

Team

rame CUEN - Artistic Director

Rame's transdisciplinary background comes from business management, rock music and photography. In 1994, Rame enrolled in classical guitar classes at the UABJO School of Fine Arts, however he was looking to learn double bass, a course not yet offered in. His participation in the local music scene includes bands like Brida and Elinor with a total of 9 studio albums produced. In 2000, he completed a documentary program at ICP (the International Center of Photography in New York). Since then his work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including the book presentation Eyes of the World at UN after he got the Alexia Student Grand Award. In 2000 he was also granted the young creators award by FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, México). In 2010 he graduated from the MA Program in Media and Film, The New School where he also obtained a business design certificate later in 2016. In 2012 he became director of MACO, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca. In 2014 he leaves to collaborate with his family to develop the new structure of Museum Belber Jimenez, a museum of folk art with a peculiar approach to contemporary art where he worked closely with artists-in-residence from Queens Museum in New York including Allen Frame and Juan Betancurt among local artists like Trini Ellitsgard, La piztola and Sabino Guisu. From 2017 until 2020 he fostered collaborations in spaces that he also designed like Casa Mosca and his own CUEN Gallery. These collaborations continue to bear fruits in La Clinica.

Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas - Curator & Residency coordinador 

Ramón is an object designer, artist and curator based in Rotterdam. He is also a curator at La Clinica, an artist-led artspace and artist residency in Oaxaca, Mexico. In Rotterdam he works as an independent curator where he has gained experience in artistic research and curatorial making processes. Ramón holds a MA in Curation and Critical theory from the Design Academy Eindhoven, and a BFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

He has participated in exhibitions in the 5th Design Biennial Istanbul, in New York with Jonald Dudd Gallery, in Eindhoven at Onomatopee Project Space, in Mexico City at Salon Acme and Guadalajara 90210. His graduation project from SAIC, Mending Wall, is currently exhibited at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna where it is part of their permanent design collection. For La Clinica he has consolidated the production of international artists, and  partnerships such as The Creative Industries Fund (Stimuleringsfonds), and the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU).

Jiménez Cárdenas' practice as a maker is rooted in problematizing auto-ethnographical methods, object making, and sculpture.  

Alari - Programmaker 

Alejandra Ariel Gómez obtained her undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology at the Universidad Veracruzana. She is currently pursuing a diploma in curating, museography and exhibition management taught by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). From 2017 she began coaching artists to develop exhibitions for commercial galleries in the city of Oaxaca. She participated in the editorial project +50 contemporary artists in Oaxaca and has also been a production assistant in the art department for different advertising campaigns.

In the field of anthropology, she has been a teacher on gender studies, giving courses to police officers in the south of Mexico. In 2021 she founded Cuartopropio, a curatorial project which began as a contemporary art gallery in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. The venue functioned as a traveling space to share artistic work from different peripheries of the city. Noteworthy collaborations include Bayrol Jiménez, Monica Figueroa, Greta Pruneda and David Sater.

Our predecessor, the clinic Santo Domingo de Guzmán was founded on the 27 of September 1982 by the doctors Ernesto López Lena, Rodolfo Armado Ramiréz Santaella, Moisés Ortega Viveros, Ángel Lorenzo González Rivera, Isaís Valdez Zaragoza, Ramón Jiménez Caballero, Francisco de Jesús Ramirez Santaella, José Juan Manuel Hermoso Limón, Vilma Virginia Barahona de Ayala, Jorge Humberto Ayala Villarreal, and Herminio Marcos Segura Jiménez.