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...
The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...
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...
Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood...
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 two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies)...
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...
Mesoamericana (Economic activities) is part of a larger project titled Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, which includes a video as well as series of hand drawn maps -based on historical cartography- that examine the effects of foreign power in Mexico today...
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...
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...
In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon...
Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...