Elephant Curated by Magalí Arriola

Elephant takes its title from Pol Tabouret’s eponymous sculpture – a tall black-headed figure with a nose that transforms into a trumpet. Drawing parallels between the notes of a wind instrument and the binding cry of pachyderms, the French artist describes this work as staging a call for spirits to summon and rise in solidarity, resistance, and emancipation. As a silent overture to the exhibition, this black figure strongly resonates with the outstretched hand of Miles Davis, photographed in 1986 by Irving Penn, coinciding with the release of Davis’s album Tutu (1986), a tribute to South African human rights and anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu. This, however, was far from Davis’s first act of protest against racial injustice. His life and work were deeply involved in the struggle for equality as music became a platform to fight discrimination during the US Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, Davis was approached by boxing promoter and film producer Bill Cayton to score a documentary about the legendary heavyweight Jack Johnson – a figure Davis, an amateur boxer himself, had long admired. “Johnson portrayed freedom,” he wrote in the liner notes of the resulting album A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971).  

Drawing inspiration across disciplines, Elephant brings together anecdotes and figures in a sequence of resonant moments where boxing emerges as a form of resistance and survival. The exhibition not only revisits the legacy of Black Power in the United States through figures like Johnson but also invokes the early struggles of the Chicano movement led by Mexican American poet, boxer, and activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, whose perspective becomes a guiding lens in Naufus Ramírez Figueroa’s contribution to the exhibition.1 Since the nineteenth century, boxing has not only represented a form of livelihood and survival for descendants of Black slaves and Latin American migrants in the United States, but it also constituted a strategy of resistance for figures like the white European, proto-Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan, who embraced pugilism as a vehicle for rebellion and social critique. Cravan left France in 1915 to avoid conscription into World War I and drifted throughout Europe and the Americas. In 1916, he landed in Barcelona, where he famously fought and lost to the fugitive Jack Johnson, then unjustly accused of violating the Mann Act.2 Cravan continued performing his amateur boxing in New York and Mexico City (yet another waypoint in Johnson’s exile) before vanishing from the port of Veracruz.   

These various historical narratives, from different time periods, are connected in Chiki’s Wakeful (2025), a work representing collective consciousness in the guise of a dream-like proxy that wears a dual mask and wanders through Mexico City in search of identity and belonging. The figure’s painted portrait and its wearable props act both as a tribute to the boxers’ personae and as a critique of the power structures that shaped and constrained their bodies and lives. Some resisted, like Johnson and Cravan, with choreographed matches while others like Benny “Kid” Paret and Emile Griffith – a Cuban émigré and a former hat-maker who later championed gay rights – did so in heated encounters that led to a last, tragic fight. This spectral entity in Chiki’s work enters into dialogue with Mr. Lonely (2024), Eunnam Hong’s self-representation in camouflage attire, an autofiction of sorts that speaks to everyday struggles. The work borrows its title from Bobby Vinton’s 1962 eponymous song, written during his deployment in Vietnam – the same year that Griffith and Paret met for their fatal third fight, broadcast live on national television.   

In Untitled (Neutral Corner) (2018), Lucas Arruda composes a short video by framing and cutting the original footage of the fight, structured around three elements: the ring, the witnesses, and the moment of the fall – all three reverberating throughout the exhibition in works such as Paloma Bosquê’s taut cords traversing the exhibition space as if leading to the underworld; Ramírez Figueroa’s surrogate vision spelling out Corky’s radical poetry, and Bárbara Sánchez Kane’s soft, entangled bodies. We see Paret descending to his demise across the ropes, knocked out by Griffith, whose rage was reportedly ignited by a homophobic insult thrown by his opponent at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized.3 Echoing Arruda’s description of his monochromes from the Deserto-Modelo series as “a place you can visit and experience death” one step further, Edgar Calel reflects on these moments of transition and passage, retrieving the traces of the striving spirits to make their struggles visible again.   

Pugilism, as sport and spectacle, has long been associated with political empowerment around civil rights, race, diaspora, and migration. Far less often has it been linked to gender and identity. In a moment when many of these topics are re-surfacing from the political subtext of contemporary society, Elephant calls for the wrestling of bodies, the raising of spirits, the shifting of weight as it breaks the tautness of silence with the murmured coo of reconcilement.