Places / Traces

11 October 2026 – 22 January 2027 

A place is never only what stands before us; it is also what we carry forward from it. Places/Traces is Obra’s first solo exhibition, presenting the work of Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas. Curated by Juliana Biancardine, the show interrogates how we come to know a place: where we stand, the scale at which we look, and what memories are ultimately formed. Bonillas moves between the scale of the city and the home, allowing memories, stories, and dreams to shape how space is both made and imagined. The exhibition’s central inquiry asks how the visible and invisible qualities of a place find their way into collective memory. 

What connects Bonillas and Sordo Madaleno is the role of the archive. In 2000, the Bonillas inherited his grandfather’s photographic collection, which he named the J. R. Plaza Archive, and which went on to shape more than twenty of his own works over the following sixteen years. Sordo Madaleno, founded in 1937 and now in its third generation, draws on a similar inheritance – the archive becoming a constant, recurring, living resource. 

The exhibition brings together six of Bonillas’ works that shift constantly in scale. Large-scale pieces centred on Mexico City, among them Espectador del naufragio and Ciudad y paisaje, sit alongside more intimate images drawn from his family’s photographs, tracing how memories of landscape and nature change over time. Elsewhere, works zoom into architectural details that might otherwise go unnoticed, converting them to a series of iconography. Others step back to the city, its streets, and its historic facades. Running through the entire show is the idea of the fragment – the way samples of memory cling to a place and colour how it is remembered. The show begins outside the exhibition space, along Regent’s Canal, where photographs from Secretos – shot in 2016 to cpature Casa Barragán – are hung on Obra’s windows, pulling the exhibition onto the life of the street. 

Alongside the exhibition, a public programme of three conversations and a film screening will continue to explore the meaning of the archive – what it means to hold traces in a physical, chronologised inventory, carrying a collection of fragments into the future.