salt 18: Amor Muñoz

Amor Muñoz is a Mexico City-based artist who works at the intersections of technology, craft, labor, and biology. Through an expansive research-driven practice, she traces how technology is deeply embedded in our material and cultural lives.

For her salt exhibition, Muñoz turns to corn, or elote in Spanish. Corn is more than a food: it is a carrier of memory, a record of cultural exchange, and a living system of knowledge that has been passed across generations. salt 18 features an immersive installation called KaleidescopElote. The interactive sculpture and Augmented Reality (AR) sound experience comes to life with visitors’ embodied movement in the gallery. Using enlarged resin kernels as building blocks, the sculpture can be an observatory, a lighthouse, a seed bank, or an oracle. With an interactive digital kaleidoscope of stars and seeds inside, the installation explores ancient relationships between agriculture, architecture, and celestial observation. Bringing contemporary technologies into contact with much older systems of knowledge, this exhibition reveals the long exchange between people, the natural world, and the vast patterns of the cosmos.

salt 18 is accompanied by a publication with a featured essay, “Corn, Code, Cosmos: Ancient Intelligence in the Work of Amor Muñoz,” by Dr. Emily Lawhead, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the UMFA.

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About the Artist

Amor Muñoz is a self-taught, interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Mexico City. Her practice encompasses textiles, sculpture, sound, installation, and performance. For over fifteen years, she has worked with experimental electronics and crafts, transforming the rigid language of engineering into something soft, tactile, and flexible.

Muñoz has been an artist-in-residence at La Becque (Switzerland), Bauhaus Dessau (Germany), and Google Arts & Culture (France). Her work has been exhibited at numerous museums, galleries, and festivals, among them the Barbican Centre (UK); 21er Haus (Austria); SFMOMA (USA); MUAC (Mexico); Ars Electronica (Austria); Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong); Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador); The National Art Center, Tokyo (Japan); G Museum (Nanjing, China); Lentos Museum (Austria); Havana Biennial (Cuba); and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade, Serbia), among others. Her work is featured in collections such as Kadist, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, the Carrillo Gil Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, CIFO, and Bauhaus Dessau.

About salt

Founded in 2010, salt is a solo exhibition series that showcases work by groundbreaking contemporary artists. The annual series features regional, national, and international artists who are actively shaping the global landscape of contemporary art and engaging with the most urgent themes of our time.

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