Words by

Iryna Zubenko

Photo by

Vigfús Birgisson

In Between Cultures, Under Construction

In a country where every fifth person has arrived from somewhere else, the topic of immigration and adaptation is embedded in the collective psyche. Iceland-based Mexican artist Hugo Llanes addresses this through humour and punk, blending cultural references from both his home country and his adopted one to create something entirely new. Bonita, his multimedia installation now on view at the Reykjavík Art Museum’s D-Gallery brings together sound and video, sculpture, textile, lenticular prints and more, all built around a steel scaffold as structure that serves as the exhibition’s backbone and central metaphor.

“I wanted to have this body structure that is temporary, that is not always fixed, that can be removed, that somehow implies being under construction,” Hugo explains. “I think this process of adaptation is being under construction. It’s not a final position or structure or platform, but something that is just temporary.” Running through the scaffolding, in a room cast in muted industrial green, are queuing belts with text, or subtitles, as Hugo calls them. Nearby, three buckets filled with Lýsi pills, Iceland’s infamous cod liver oil supplement, glow from within like gold. 

At the heart of the show is Bonita, Hugo’s alter ego that exists in the liminal space between cultures. “Bonita is this space, but also this being that lives between cultures, between translations and interpretations,” he explains.

Born from experiments at Kling & Bang, Bonita has since evolved into a costumed figure made from black belts, deliberately stripped of any ethnic or geographic markers. “I wanted to break through it being depicted through body features, something that resembles somebody from a particular place,” Hugo says. “I didn’t want people to recognise that this person is from Latin America, for example, or is brown, things like that.”

That in-between existence is visualised through a series of lenticular prints, where Bonita appears against landscape paintings by one of Iceland’s most prominent painters, Kjarval. “I was first thinking who could be Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo for Icelanders or for Iceland? Then I was like, ‘Kjarval,’” Hugo snaps his fingers. “Kjarval is somebody who has managed to be a reference point for Icelandic art globally,” he explains. “Without Kjarval, the piece wouldn’t be or make sense. I wanted to juxtapose this being that is from many, many sources in front of something that also originates from many sources.” 

Brúni og hvíti…vááá!

One of the exhibition’s central works is a reinterpretation of “Luxor y Mohawk” by Las Ultrasonicas, a female punk band from 1990s Mexico City whose original song told the story of a punk couple navigating prejudice and conservative society of those days. Hugo commissioned GRÓA, an Icelandic punk band known for their DIY-approach and unmatched energy to cover the song. The result is more, as Hugo puts it, “a situational cover” — the pit of the original song is preserved, but the story is completely reinterpreted: it is now situated in Iceland, and sung in Icelandic. The new song is about a biracial gay Mexican-Icelandic couple, where a Mexican partner moves to Iceland and the Icelandic partner introduces the Mexican partner to a new culture, the two are referred to as “brúni” (“brownie”) and “hvíti” (“blondie”). 

“I wanted to give a whole new sense of contemporary Iceland into it by taking and by mirroring two sources to create this hybrid,” Hugo shares. 

The piece consists of a three-minute punk track, with lyrics displayed on queuing belts in English, Icelandic and Spanish, followed by seven minutes of silence, on a continuous loop.

Lost and found in translation

Even though the exhibition employs different media, at its core it is strongly language-based. Hugo displays pages from his first Icelandic textbook, Íslenska fyrir alla, something every immigrant who has ever tried to master the language will recognise. Also on display are his first work permit and a CV translated into Icelandic. He draws attention to similarities between words in the two languages, highlighting their overlaps. Take, for example, hola, which means “hi” in Spanish and “a hole” in Icelandic, a contrast he highlights by carving out words and making holes in them.

In another work, Hugo reinterprets a painting by the Icelandic artist Stórval, known for his naive sheep-and-mountain motifs. Instead of sewing horns on sheep, he uses the word “fé,” which in Icelandic means money, livestock, and wealth. “When I approach this word, I don’t read ‘fé,’” he explains. I read ‘fe’ and ‘fe’ in Spanish means faith.” 

Hugo admits he has long been fascinated by discovering objects that connect to his home culture in Iceland. Some of his finds, like the book Undir mexíkósku mána about an Icelandic family trip to Mexico, or elements from DVDs he found in a Kjötborg shop in Vesturbær, are reimagined in the exhibition. In one piece, Hugo takes lyrics from a live DVD of Celia Cruz, one of the most iconic Latin American artists, and literally translates them into Icelandic and English, placing them on queuing belts, or narrates a telenovela in Icelandic and English as it would be narrated in Spanish. 

“I got these two materials for 600 krónur in a corner store in Vesturbær. I thought, ‘wow, these coincidences that made me get this material in Iceland have to be part of the show,’” he smiles.

In another such coincidence, Hugo’s ÚTL ticket has been enlarged and reproduced as a rug, hand tufted with white Mexican and black Icelandic wool. “It’s an enlargement of my real ticket, when I went to collect my permanent residency card in 2025,” he explains. In the piece, Hugo draws attention to the cultural and economic importance of wool in both Iceland and Mexico, while also addressing the process foreigners must go through to be accepted into the country.

Ongoing adaptation

“[The show] seeks beyond that feeling of just being a foreigner,” Hugo says at the end of our conversation. “Because I’m still a foreigner, but I live here so I’m no longer a foreigner,” he shrugs. 

That in-between state runs through the exhibition. Hugo marks his physical presence in Iceland by writing norður, “north” in Icelandic, dozens of times on a white pillar with his non-dominant hand, reminding himself where he is and where he comes from. 

He agrees that fitting into a new culture and trying to navigate a new, strange language can be incredibly difficult. But he seems to have made a conscious choice not to anchor himself in the frustration and resentment immigration can bring. Instead, he opens his personal story to talk about these challenges.

“What I am trying to kind of pick, I’m not saying that everybody is the same, or that everybody has to seek beyond that,” Hugo says. “I think we all have different strategies, and this is my strategy — use humour, use punk, use vulnerability, to kind of pass through all these ways of being in inhabiting contemporary Iceland.” 

Eight years in, Hugo still finds himself mid-construction. “Linguistically, it will be an ongoing exercise for some time in terms of adaptation,” he says. “I see the scaffolding system as just a stage — as under construction. I don’t know how the construction is gonna end.”

Bonita is on view at the Reykjavík Art Museum until May 3. Hugo Llanes will lead a guided tour of the exhibition in Spanish on April 16 at 20:00. It will be interpreted into Icelandic.