Places/Traces, by Iñaki Bonillas

Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas’ work enters the Obra Living Room in Places/Traces, a show narrating the experience of place through perspective, scale and memory

Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas brings his work to Obra for its first solo exhibition. Places/Traces opens on Sunday 11 October and remains on view until Friday 22 January 2027, launched alongside an adjoining event series. The opening runs from 2pm until late, with a talk between the artist and curator Dr Gabriella Nugent at 4pm.

The exhibit explores different ways of understanding place through Bonillas’ works, ranging from photography to works drawn from his personal archive. Large-scale photography-based installations examining districts in Mexico City, including Espectador del Naufragio and Ciudad y Paisaje, sit alongside personal vignettes from his family archive that chronicle changing memories of landscape and natural environments. The unifying thread is the fragment: how pieces of memory attach to a place and shape the way it is remembered.

Places/Traces follows Obra’s inaugural exhibition, Memory as Material, which positioned the tacit role of materials in Sordo Madaleno’s practice as the interlocutor of memory and, ultimately, belonging. Bonillas extends this positioning through photography, across six pieces that oscillate in scale. At instances, he magnifies seemingly mundane details in architecture, building an iconography out of otherwise fleeting minutiae. At others, he takes the framing of place to the scale of the city and its streets, placing large-scale images of heritage facades from his photographic archive documenting Mexico City.

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Iñaki Bonillas (b. 1981, Mexico City, where he lives and works) works primarily with two mediums — photography and space — and the strange and fascinating ways in which they intersect. Solo exhibitions include Plečnik House, Ljubljana (2025), Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City (2016), La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona (2012), and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (2009). He has shown at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale, and MoMA, New York.

Dr Gabriella Nugent is an art historian and curator based in London, specialising in global modern and contemporary art. She holds a PhD in the history of art from University College London and is the author of two books, most recently Inji Efflatoun and the Mexican Muralists (2022).

~ Places/Traces is presented with the generous support of Galerie Nordenhake Mexico City.