Not The Same As It Was: Revisiting Pop Culture Memories

Not The Same As It Was: Revisiting Pop Culture Memories brings together six contemporary Mexico-based artists—Julio Alarcón, Néstor Jiménez, Napoleón Aguilera, Alicia Valladares, Fernando Gress Muñoz, and Gibrán Mendoza—whose work examines the intersection of nostalgia, history, and contemporary culture. The exhibition explores how references to pop culture, collective memory, and time continue to inform and complicate our understanding of the present.

Each artist engages with visual cues from the past—whether through cultural icons, symbolic materials, or objects—to reveal how familiar images can take on new meaning over time. These works are not about sentimentality; rather, they use memory as a lens to critique, reimagine, and reinterpret the world around us.

In revisiting the pop culture, Not The Same As It Was considers how personal and collective pasts shape the visual language of today.