5:00 minutes (looped)
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.
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...
Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval...
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 two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies)...
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...