Milena Bonilla is a participating artist in our fall program Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor (2015). Her featured work This rabbit looks to the left: Chocolate Scrying is a performative gathering created with artist Luisa Ungar where guests are invited to drink chocolate and take part in a public scrying. Hot chocolate leaves the stains necessary for images to turn into visions, and for conversation to pursue specific questions. The inapprehensible character of the liquid plays on fears, affections and expectations, as well as with the idea that there is a future and there was a past.

Milena Bonilla (b. 1975, Bogota, Colombia) graduated in visual arts at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota, Colombia, in 2000, and followed a post-academic course at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2009-2010. Her current practice involves explorations on knowledge interpreted as a work force, and Nature as an entity colonized by language, consumed in a massive scale through images. The artist uses a variety of media in her production including installations, video, drawing, text, public interventions and photography. She currently lives and works in Amsterdam and has been making collaborative work with Luisa Ungar since 2013.

Her work has been shown and performed in different international venues, including The Mistake Room, Los Angeles Ca.; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid;  Rong Wrong, Amsterdam; The Photographer’s Gallery and the International Institute of Visual Arts in London; Witte de With in Rotterdam; Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand (Norway) and Kunsternes Hus in Oslo; Konstall C in Stockholm; Marrakech and Shangai Biennial’s parallel projects, and the 12^th. Istanbul, 10^th. Havana and 3^rd. Bucharest Biennials.