Milena Bonilla: An Endless Present

An Endless Present features a group of C-prints depicting book covers from scientific publications. These covers appear as references to a series of research in biotechnology, psychiatry, geology, genetics, physics, social history, etc. They span the realm of what is possible to know, but acquire an ambiguous dimension, since the books referenced are unlikely to be found on the market. The images are presented as traces of speculative content, questioning whether the official realm of knowledge is what we understand as truth via institutional authority. Milena Bonilla thus plays with the image of science as a machine that epitomizes “current” or actual facts, while also reflecting on the ideological beliefs that this machine might produce, and the role that time plays as its own nemesis.

At moments the contents revealed by the selected books become Orwellian, sometimes chimerical and dreamlike, or alternatively cynical. The pieces in the exhibition are organized following a threshold between what is likely to become fiction, or comes from it, and what is a mirrored image of a politically charged reality.

As we see progress advancing and producing knowledge, information and life as commodities, Milena Bonilla reflects on how agencies of knowledge encourage us to embrace an inexistent future by envisaging a single anachronistic, parallel present.