Milena Bonilla: The Hour Before Sunset

Curated by Juan Luis Toboso. 

“The hour before sunset has a magic all its own...” Rosa Luxemburg wrote to her friend, Hans Diefenbach, in a letter sent from Wronke prison in the summer of 1917. Based on this correspondence, Milena Bonilla invites us to think about the possibilities of building an imaginary universe that navigates between literature, botany, sporadic historical references and collective mythologies. Here, “the hour before sunset” is a conception of a magical temporal moment that links the past and present through the creation of political and emotional resonances.

This exhibition is a further development in Milena Bonilla’s wider research, which explores the limits of the archive and the interpretation of history as a way of articulating a possible collective memory. The project infiltrates the symbolic spaces created within Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking and also creates interstitial spaces that link together different forms of knowledge production in order to explore what we could call “suspended historical temporality.”

Milena Bonilla was born in Bogota, Colombia, and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Her research-based practice is currently invested in epistemological colonialism and the different ways it affects organisms, language and social structures. By identifying patterns, gaps and silences within specific historical narratives, the artist draws tensions between predetermined political templates and uses of cognition. These conceptual and perceptual exercises appear weaved across the manifold material manifestations of her work.

Juan Luis Toboso is the Senior Curator of Galeria Municipal do Porto. 

For media inquiries: Hernâni Baptista, hernanibatista [​at​] agoraporto.pt / Tiago Dias dos Santos, tiagosantos [​at​] agoraporto.pt