Cocido y Crudo (Cooked and Raw)

Cocido y Crudo brought together fifty-four international artists to critically engage with questions of cultural identity, postcolonial discourse, and the shifting paradigms of global artistic production in the 1990s. Drawing conceptually from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked (1964), curator Dan Cameron inverted the original framework to challenge hierarchical distinctions between “advanced” and “primitive” cultures.

The exhibition positioned art within debates on cultural exchange, identity formation, and the dismantling of dominant Euro-American narratives. Artists explored themes such as cartography (geographic and symbolic), migration, exile, mythology, anthropology, and the body as a site of political inscription.

Kcho participated in the exhibition with the installation Lo mejor del verano (1994), aligning with the exhibition’s focus on insularity, cultural mythologies, and the negotiation of identity through local materials and narratives within a global context.

The exhibition remains a landmark project in the institutional recognition of postcolonial aesthetics and emerging global practices of the 1990s.

Artist List: Afrika (Sergei Bugaev), Janine Antoni, Stefano Arienti, Sadie Benning, Xu Bing, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Geneviève Cadieux, Victoria Civera, Juan Dávila, Wim Delvoye, Mark Dion, Eugenio Dittborn, Willie Doherty, Lili Dujourie, Marlene Dumas, Jimmie Durham, Maria Eichhorn, Sylvie Fleury, Renée Green, Mona Hatoum, José Antonio Hernández-Diez, Gary Hill, Damien Hirst, David Horan, Narelle Jubelin, Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado), Bodys Isek Kingelez, Martin Kippenberger, Igor Kopystiansky, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Mariusz Kruk, Eva Lofdahl, Rogelio López Cuenca, Petr Lysáček, Paul McCarthy, Marlene McCarty, Tatsuo Miyajima, Pedro Mora, Juan Luis Moraza, Yasumasa Morimura, Jean Baptiste Ngnetchopa, Marcel Odenbach, Gabriel Orozco, Vong Phaophanit, Pierre et Gilles (Pierre Commoy, Gilles Blanchard), Keith Piper, Rosângela Rennó, Faith Ringgold, Allen Ruppersberg, Doris Salcedo, Julia Scher, Kiki Smith, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sue Williams, Fred Wilson

Comisariado: Dan Cameron