Iñaki Bonillas Turns Grandfather's Archive into a Fictional Biopic at La Virreina

In 2000, Mexican artist Iñaki Bonillas (born 1981) inherited over 30 albums, 800 slides, and numerous documents from his grandfather J. R. Plaza, capturing family, work, and leisure. Since 2003, Bonillas has extracted hundreds of images from this material, subtly reworking them to conduct an 'ethno-photographic' investigation into archiving, representation, and familial memory. The exhibition at La Virreina – Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (February 24 – May 6, 2012) serves as a retrospective of this corpus, a fictional 'biopic' where the artist never reveals actual family details. The archive functions as both object and subject, material and pretext. The show offers three parallel narratives: the first traces 20th-century photography from analog to digital and black-and-white to color; the second charts Bonillas's evolution from the seminal conceptual installation 'Little History of Photography II' (2003), which presented documents as archaeological remains, to the seductive Cibachromes (2012) that play with his grandfather's role-playing; the third demonstrates photography's manipulative possibilities—conceptual, administrative, novelistic, discursive, even burlesque—proving the range of an artist equally interested in what the archive indexes and its future.