Aichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto CityAichi Triennale 2025: A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Period:September 13 to November 30, 2025, 79 days, Venues: Aichi Arts Center, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, Seto City

What’s On

Minerva Cuevas

  • Contemporary Art
  • Seto City

Exhibition

  • Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2025
  • Minerva Cuevas, The Children, 2025
  • ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee
  • Photo: Kido Tamotsu
Description

Minerva Cuevas is an artist creating research-based projects; her practice emphasizes a social approach to art, often focusing on ecological concerns. For Aichi Triennale 2025, Cuevas has produced a large-scale mural measuring 11 meters in height and 4 meters in width installed at the entrance of the Seto City Art Museum, a key hub for culture and the arts in Seto. The mural includes many motifs drawn from Kitagawa Tamiji (1894-1989), a painter deeply influenced by the Mexican muralism movement and the model of open-air art schools during the time he lived in Mexico (1921-1936). It also features symbolic elements, including animals, video game characters, and corporate logos. It highlights Kitagawa’s cultural significance in Seto and his perspective on children as an art educator, as well as elements that evoke both pre-Columbian and contemporary Japanese cultures.
Cuevas’s mural not only honors the artistic histories of both countries but also invites reflection on the relationship between art, community, and social responsibility. It rises like a contemporary ruin where past and present converge.

Venue

Seto City Art Museum

Profile

  • Born 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico. Based in Mexico City, Mexico.

Minerva Cuevas creates research-based projects that allow the audience an insight into the social sphere through site-specific actions and artworks. She researches the notions of value, exchange, and property inherent to the capitalist system and its social consequences to explore the latent possibility of rebellion implicit in everyday life. Her work encompasses a wide range of media-installation, video, muralism, sculpture, and public intervention to explore our familiar visual references like the ones of commercial branding to question the notions present in our political imaginary, facilitating channels of social communication. The main areas of her research have been: ecology movements, anthropology, and corporate history. She founded Mejor Vida Corp in 1998 and the International Understanding Foundation in 2016.

Selected exhibitions
2023
Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology, Barbican Centre (London, UK)
2023
Solo exhibition, Game Over, Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico)
2021
11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: One Escape at a Time, Seoul Museum of Art (Korea)
2019
SOFT POWER, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA)
2005
Sharjah Biennial 7: Belonging (UAE)
  • “The Trust” 2023
  • Courtesy of Kurimanzutto Mexico, New York.