160 x 100 cm
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions. Her drawings, sculptures, and photography are active investigations into our often-fallible notions of history. Stone Deaf (2009) is a direct intervention into Karl Marx’s gravesite, for which the artist literally traced the history of Marx’s grave. She traveled to Highgate in London seeking the gravesite, only to find a plaque stating that Marx’s remains had been removed in 1954 to another part of the cemetery. She discovered that this had taken place at the behest of the British Communist Party, and that the deceased was now in a more prominent location, marked with a bust and a monument. Bonilla’s rubbing of the original plaque celebrates an anti-monument, so to speak, calling into question Marx’s life and legacy.
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, transit, and politics through everyday interventions. Her drawings, sculptures, installations, videos, texts, public interventions, and photographs are active investigations into our often-fallible notions of history. The artist’s current practice involves explorations of knowledge interpreted as a work force, and of nature as an entity colonized by language, consumed on a massive scale through images. For the last decade or so, Bonilla’s work has specifically explored the dichotomy of the Aristotelian categories of physis (nature) and logos (reason). The artist’s impulse to exert control over this relationship results in political armatures that ultimately seek to limit interactions between living systems, and to confront our biases regarding the relationships between thought and action.
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...
Mary Weatherford Revisits an ARTnews Profile of Joan Mitchell – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All September 4, 2020 10:27am ©ARTnews In 1957, art critic Irving Sandler paid a visit to the studio of painter Joan Mitchell , an Abstract Expressionist known for her brushy images capturing nature...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...
Efectos de familia (Family Effects, 2007–9) is a series of 13 videos that dramatize an array of abusive events derived from Edgardo Aragón’s family’s history—specifically its involvement with organized crime...
El mar y sus múltiples afluentes (The Sea and its Multiple Tributaries) builds on the concept of trafficking that Adriana Bustos has been exploring over the last decade...
In the agricultural areas of Mexico, Indigenous people use the mylar magnetic tape unspooled from VHS cassettes as an alternative to the scarecrow—the reflective tape flutters in the wind and does an excellent job scaring birds away from crops...
The stained glass windows of Chloé Quenum’s Les Allégories evoke the sacred and describe the movement of a rooster in the form of patterns extracted from a wax fabric found in Benin...
Within the narrative of Sahej Rahal’s The rocks we will find, beings perform absurd acts in derelict corners of the city, emerging into the everyday as if from the cracks of our civilization, transforming them into liminal sites of ritual, and challenging ways in which we experience time and space...
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...