Berenice Olmedo

Mexico City-based artist Berenice Olmedo creates sculptures and kinetic installations that often integrate prostheses and orthoses. Her works—fusions of medical plastics, armatures, and surgical implants—challenge notions of human wholeness and draw attention to the political dimensions of disability, illness, and care. In her practice, Olmedo considers standardized or hegemonic expectations of the human body and explores the extent to which external aids are essential to contemporary life. By reusing forms and materials from the medical field, she challenges dominant fixations on efficiency and optimization in favor of a more mutualistic, politically inextricable view of embodiment.

Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987 Oaxaca, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Selected solo exhibitions include Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Simian, Copenhagen; and Jan Kaps, Cologne. Her work has been shown in institutional group exhibitions including Museo de la Ciudad de México; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; 36th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; 14th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux; ICA Boston, Boston; Boros Collection, Berlin; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Latvia, amongst others. Olmedo will be included in New Humans: Memories of the future at the New Museum in New York in March 2026.