Press Release

Jesus Benavente

Ecce Hombre

Chapter 4: Why I Cannot Be Restored to Former Glory 

Chapter 5: Why I Am Not Dancing, I’m Struggling to Survive

12.12- 19.12.2025

 

Reception Rome is pleased to present the final two chapters of Jesus Benavente’s exhibition Ecce Hombre, a project articulated in five chapters from September to December 2025. The fifth chapter of Ecce Hombre presents Jesus Benavente’s newest iteration of his ongoing performance/installation series informally known as the “sad party.” In this work, Benavente transforms the gallery into a fully equipped yet quietly destabilized party environment—one that is only completed through audience participation, and whose atmosphere oscillates between celebration, vulnerability, and unease. What appears at first to be an immersive social setting gradually reveals itself as a carefully constructed meditation on spectacle, complicity, and the psychological weight of state power.

 

At the center of the installation is a simple but loaded premise: a party that may or may not happen. Benavente embraces the possibility of failure—maybe guests don’t show up, or if they do, maybe they aren’t sure how to engage. The work acknowledges this uncertainty as part of its conceptual armature. The lights, music, drinks, and video projection are all present, but within the institutional context of the gallery they take on a more contemplative register. Instead of inviting abandon, the installation slows viewers down, prompting them to interrogate how joy and danger can coexist within the same visual and sonic cues.

 

This tension is most palpable in the work’s video component. For years, Benavente has collected clips from online fan pages devoted to police car lighting effects—an unexpected subculture of enthusiasts who obsessively film, categorize, and celebrate the sirens and strobing patterns deployed by police departments across the country. What these archives reveal is that such light-and-sound displays are often customized rather than standardized, shaped by local preference, departmental choice, or even the whim of individual officers.

 

Benavente synchronizes these sirens and flashing lights with a continuous music playlist, weaving them into the beat structure so that they function as rhythmic accents within the soundtrack. Projected large-scale across the gallery walls, the videos are overlaid with pulsing text: phrases like “Hands in the Air” and “Get Up, Get Down,” which flicker between motivational hype and coercive command. Their ambiguity is deliberate. In one context, these directives belong to the vocabulary of nightlife; in another, they signal the threat of state violence. Benavente’s installation forces viewers to inhabit that unstable linguistic and emotional terrain.

 

The “sad party” thus becomes a metaphor for a broader climate of surveillance, fear, and structural precarity—conditions that have intensified in the wake of the George Floyd murder, nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, and the escalating presence of ICE raids across the United States. Benavente’s work grapples with the aesthetics of authority not as abstract symbolism, but as a lived and racialized reality that shapes how bodies move, gather, celebrate, or withdraw. The installation’s sonic and visual overload mirrors the psychological dissonance of trying to experience joy under the pressure of systems designed to intimidate or control.

 

Across its multiple iterations, Benavente has titled this evolving project I Am Not Dancing, I’m Struggling to Survive—a reframing that collapses the distance between celebration and desperation. For Ecce Hombre, this iteration becomes Chapter 5: Why I Am Not Dancing, I’m Struggling to Survive, situating it within the exhibition’s larger narrative about endurance, vulnerability, and the fragile spaces where humor, faith, and survival intersect.

 

Yet for all its tension, the “sad party” is also very much a party—meant to be enjoyable, communal, and alive. In this chapter, Benavente performs the role of a Sonidero, drawing on a Mexican and Mexican-American tradition in which the DJ is not simply a music selector but an energetic narrator, hype-maker, and cultural conduit. Like the sonideros of neighborhoods from Tepito to San Antonio, Benavente animates the space through music, shout-outs, and rhythmic interplay, transforming the installation into a social event shaped by collective presence.

 

What begins as a party becomes a site of critical reflection—and what begins in critique circles back to celebration. Benavente’s “sad party” reveals how the tools of festivity and the tools of enforcement can occupy the same sensory field, and how survival often requires navigating both at once, together.

 

On the same night, as a one night event, Benavente will present Chapter 4: Why I Cannot Be Restored to Former Glory. In it he will recreate his market stand just outside the gallery. Embracing the atmosphere and ethos of a flea market, Benavente offers an array of merchandise made by the artist himself: hand-printed T-shirts,original paintings, inexpensive stickers, and factory-produced blankets and mugs featuring original imagery. By presenting these items as both artwork and commodity, he playfully disrupts the hierarchies that typically separate “serious” art objects from souvenirs or street ephemera. The gesture satirizes the consumer rituals attached to commercial art exhibitions while acknowledging the everyday economies that shape cultural life.

 

More than a marketplace, the installation becomes a social encounter. Here, the transactional moment itself becomes part of the performance, a means of engaging audiences in a shared, immediate economy of presence. Paired with Chapter 5, Chapter 4 closes Ecce Hombre with an event grounded in participation, generosity, and communal exchange.