Stone Deaf (Drawing)

2009 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

160 x 100 cm

Milena Bonilla

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.

Colors:

• monument.n.02
• marxism.n.01
• displacement.n.06
• intervention.n.01
• prominence.n.01
• politics.n.01
• abstract versus figurative art
• andes region
• contemporary conceptualism
• drawing