Photos by Alex Gartenfeld

Whitney adjunct curator Shamim Momin is now offically a Los Angeleno, but her influence is international with her new Pop Up Gallery Project. Here project in Venice was PavilioM, a "renegade" alternative to the Mexican Pavilion at the Giardini (which featured Teresa Margolies—there's no official cause for the revolt, by the way). It's.the first of a series of international exhibitions, and a collaboration with the Fundación Magnolia that took place in the private Fifteenth Century cloister next to Madonna Dell'Orto Church, which is open for the first time. The family that owns the space recently restored it, and depending on whether you trust collector Beth DeWoody or the attendant who was watching the space, the residence was either sold by the church and the family excommunicated for buying the property, or Napoleon broke it up. Both sound good, and the cloister is beautifully, and has been expertly (and rustically rejvenated). Momin is the guest curator, in collaboration with Curator Marina Kurikhina, and their take on a distinctive Mexican identity included Jorge Mendez Blake's The Castle, a brick wall that intervened in the space and buried Kafka's novel of the same name. Blake also contributed emotion sticks, colored bars like Andre Cadere's barre de Bois, arranged lined up against the walls and flat on the ground like tools, or toys. Where Cadere's bars followed a secret, internal rhythm, these are coded to color theory, with a mind to emotional responses. The attendant explained that the poles could potentially be handled—but not in this installation. While I was at the exhibition, it began to rain. The weather rattled the landscape photos of Mexico City by Pablo Lopez, which were suspended at their corners by cables. The winds caused an earthquake, or perhaps triggered a tenuousness something more deeply seated.