VER:
IÑAKI BONILLAS AND SILVIA GRUNER
Galerie Nordenhake, Mexico City, 2024
Bearing the deceptively simple title “Ver” (To See), this exhibition staged a riveting engagement between friends and artists Iñaki Bonillas and Silvia Gruner, uniting nine photoworks, a video animation, and a textile sculpture produced over the past twenty years. The selection originated from an effort to explore the pair’s shared visual and conceptual strategies and from the sustained principle that the act of seeing is at once historically constructed and defined by personal experience.
In the gallery’s foyer, visitors were greeted with flanking images: a photogravure and a digital print. Each depicted someone’s gaze—that of a little boy on the left side (Bonillas, Los ojos: niño #9 [The Eyes: Child #9], 2010) and that of a young woman on the right (Gruner, Viva cautivo, sea feliz [Live Captive, Be Happy], 2015), their heads framed in close-ups but obscured by hindrances. The boy covers his eyes with his right hand as if facing a glaring sight; the woman’s blurry profile in the background is concealed by a female hand in the foreground holding a cutout image—a magazine clipping?—of another woman’s eyes and nose.
The game of obliterations, superpositions, removals, omissions, and effacements that followed this preamble revealed a sophisticated exploration of the ways in which images are granted sense. For example, in Trofeo: un viaje parasitario (Trophy: A Parasitic Journey), 2013, Gruner merged her family history with the photographic souvenirs in a family album she acquired at a Berlin flea market. Along with hackneyed portraits at landmarks and clichéd vistas, an intriguing scene of a young woman—Gruner’s grandmother, an exiled Holocaust survivor—guarded like a coveted prize by three police officers, appears repeatedly. Those images are spread across thirty-five frames in which blank spaces and disparate images of knitted knots also abound. The jarring juxtaposition and lack of categories made room for the imagination, allowing or even forcing viewers to impose their own narrative. In the adjacent La idea del Norte: hielos (The Idea of the North: Ice), 2014, a grid of forty unframed prints, Bonillas also evoked a story—but by displaying familiar yet deceptive visual cues. The shattered fragments of white china, placed against a stark black background, suggest a desolate polar landscape rather than the scattered pieces of broken plates and bowls. This was more than a dialogue between works—it was more like a musical composition, a back-and-forth interplay in which one tune affects the other.
The works’ seriality, muted colors, and grid compositions contributed to a seamless configuration in which viewers had a pleasantly hard time distinguishing whose work was whose. However, Gruner’s feminist influences and playful approach to eroticism emerged in Nostalgia por la materia 1–24 (Nostalgia for Matter 1–24), 2013, and Araki, 2015, which tackle the representation of women within visual culture by obscuring or exalting desire through naked female bodies. As for Bonillas, his obsession with a political history of photography—including images’ utility as propaganda—was succinctly materialized in Trout Fishing in America 1–6, 2023, which emphasizes the way that cultural norms suppress the truth. Using outtakes from the FDR-era Farm Security Administration Photo Project—images that failed to conform to clichés of what poverty looked like and therefore went unpublished at the time—the artist worked from negatives that had been canceled by having holes punched through them. For each of the six pieces, he superimposed two or three of these images so that the holes in them line up with each other, generating surreal and ghostly scenes.
On the floor at the center of the gallery, Gruner’s Agujero blanco II (White Hole II), 2005, delivered a lighthearted intermezzo to the exhibition: another surface with a hole in it, this time a colorful rug. It made me think of Sigmund Freud collecting Persian rugs—an association perhaps justified by Gruner’s own interest in psychoanalysis—reminding me that, like memory, seeing means making sense of missing fragments.