Image: Panama Museum of Contemporary Art
MAC Panama is presenting 'otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua', an exhibition bringing together commissioned works by Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars under the curatorship of Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela. The show runs from 28 February to 23 August 2026 at MAC Panama in Ancón, and is situated within The Current IV, a three-year curatorial research programme led by TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.
The museum describes the project as part of a wider inquiry into the ocean as a shared space for thinking about life, knowledge and possible futures. In the exhibition text, the curators frame the ocean as a terrain that exceeds a strictly biological reading, proposing it instead as a site for emancipatory processes and for a perspective that moves beyond inherited notions of binarity and stability. The project also connects to 'la historia de las montañas', a curatorial research project initiated by Yina Jiménez Suriel in 2013.
Huggins and Mars each contribute works developed for the exhibition through The Current IV. According to MAC Panama, the artists explore improvisation as a way to unsettle a deterministic terrestrial perspective, reimagine the systems that sustain life, and examine the structures of power that organise perception. The exhibition is structured as a three-part dialogue: the first and third sections are set in the oceanic space through Huggins’s work, while the second turns to mountainous landscapes and to Mars’s approach to those landscapes as active sites of history and change.
Huggins presents 'A shipwreck is not a wreck' (2025), a video installation that moves through the skeletal remains of a shipwreck inhabited by human and nonhuman entities in a process of continuous transformation. The museum’s text lists rocks, corals, human bodies, jellyfish and mangroves among the figures that appear in the work. It also notes that the artist draws from the historical displacement of the Garifuna maroon nation, exiled by the British from what is now Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and later established across parts of Central America.
Mars’s audio-pictorial installation 'a call to the ocean' (2025) takes the mountain as a space of maroonage in Abya Yala and as a guide toward the oceanic perspective central to the project. MAC Panama says the work references the role of mountains and geological formations in the Haitian Revolution and incorporates a sound component inspired by the 'futuro', a shell instrument historically used for communication in revolutionary processes. The museum presents Mars’s work as moving between terrestrial and oceanic readings of landscape while tracing transformation as both individual and collective.
The exhibition is also linked to a wider regional programme of work developed through TBA21–Academy. MAC Panama notes that The Current IV has spent three years studying and testing its methods in dialogue with different Caribbean territories, including Panama, where 'Flotation' took place in June 2024 in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The museum’s exhibition page lists MAC Panama’s address as Calle San Blas, Ancón, with visiting hours from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and the show remains on view through 23 August 2026.
