Melanie Smith is the artist curated for the Mexican Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale

Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...

. Her work has been characterized by a certain re-reading of the formal and aesthetic categories of avant-gardes and post-avant-garde movements, problematized at the sites and within the horizons of heterotopias. Her production is intimately related to a certain expanded vision of the notion of modernity, maintaining a relationship both with what this means in Latin America, particularly in Mexico, and with the implication this has for her formal explorations as a critical moment in the aesthetic-political structure of modernity and late modernity.

Biography

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 enormously influenced her works ever since.

Works

Her earlier pieces considered Mexico City itself, recording its multitudes, its violence, its banality, and its clandestine nature and at the same time its inherent decomposition. The most outstanding piece from this cycle is the video Spiral city (2002). In another of her works, she broadens the notions of place and non-place by documenting the small town of Parres on the outskirts of the city. She produced a trilogy of 35mm films and a series of paintings and installations that rework the modernist idea of the monochromatic.

Exhibitions

Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, both nationally and internationally, including: PS1, New York; MoMA

Moma

Moma may refer to:* Moma , an owlet moth genus* Moma Airport, a Russian public airport* Moma District, Nampula, Mozambique* Moma River, a right tributary of the Indigirka River* Google Moma, the Google corporate intranet...

, New York, UCLA Hammer Museum

Hammer Museum

The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, or the Hammer Museum as it is more commonly known, is an art museum in the Westwood district of Los Angeles, California...

, Los Angeles; ICA, Boston; Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool

Tate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum in Liverpool, Merseyside, England, and part of Tate, along with Tate St Ives, Cornwall, Tate Britain, London, and Tate Modern, London. The museum was an initiative of the Merseyside Development Corporation...

; Tate Modern

Tate Modern

Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in London, England. It is Britain's national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group . It is the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year...

, London; South London Gallery

South London Gallery

South London Gallery, founded 1891, often known by the acronym SLG, is a public-funded gallery of contemporary art in Camberwell, London - exhibiting artists included Alfredo Jaar, Ryan Gander and Chris Burden...

, London; Lima Art Museum; Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum

Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum

Mexico's Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum , located on Paseo de la Reforma, in Mexico City, was opened in 1981 as a repository for the collection that Rufino Tamayo and his wife Olga acquired during their lifetimes and ultimately gifted to the nation...

, Contemporary Art University Museum and El Eco Experimental Museum, Mexico City; and Monterrey Museum, among others. Her individual exhibitions include: "Parres," Tate Britain

Tate Britain

Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...

 (2006); "Six steps to reality," Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego , in San Diego, California, USA, is an art museum focused on the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of works of art from 1950 to the present.-History:...

; "Parres," Miami Art Museum

Miami Art Museum

The Miami Art Museum is an art museum located in Downtown Miami, Florida, in the United States. It was founded in 1984 as the Center for the Fine Arts, and in 1996 became the Miami Art Museum...

, and "Spiral city and other artificial pleasures," a retrospective exhibition that traveled from the University Museum of Science and the Arts (MUCA) in Mexico City to The Lab at Belmar, in Denver (2008) and the MIT List in Boston (2009). She has produced two artist's books: Spiral city and other vicarious pleasures (2006) and Parres (2008).