A Surreal Kind of Ordinary

The woman, dressed all in black, lies flat on a rooftop, half-emerged from shadows that swallow the lower half of her body. Her hands are splayed against the concrete and her gaze is fixed on something beyond the frame. It might seem as though she is stalking prey, but her manner is far from menacing, closer instead to curious. It is an otherwise unremarkable setting: a stretch of rooftop, rough concrete, tiles, but against this setting, her presence and pose give the image an unmistakably theatrical, perhaps even fantastical, quality.

The untitled photograph belongs to Kati Horna’s 1962 series Historia de un vampiro: Sucedió en Coyoacán (Story of a Vampire: It Happened in Coyoacán), and is currently hanging in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, as part of the exhibition Lo insólito es lo cotidiano (The Unusual is the Everyday), the first large-scale retrospective dedicated to the photographer in Mexico City.

Kati Horna. Untitled, from the series “Historia de un vampiro: Sucedió en Coyoacán”, (1962).

Born in Hungary in 1912, Horna lived in Spain, France and Germany amidst the virulent spread of fascism in the 1930s, before fleeing in 1939 and seeking exile in Mexico. Part of a sequence of 24 images, Historia de un vampiro is a photographic narrative starring Mexican actress Beatriz Sheridan, centred on a female vampire, drawing on Horna’s fascination with the surreal, the macabre and the uncanny.

Characteristic of her increasingly experimental work in the 1960s, the series is a vehicle for storytelling rather than simply documentation. Yet a more personal dimension hangs in its midst when we consider Horna’s vampiric narrative an allegory of cultural assimilation, reworking a historically nativist trope - Dracula, after all, had to sleep in boxes filled with his native Transylvanian soil when abroad. What emerges from this photograph, and Horna’s series more broadly, is a meditation on exile and the search for belonging, with the vampire serving as an unlikely stand-in for the perpetual outsider. And, in viewing this series we are implicated by our gaze; seeing Horna’s figure of exile, we are cast as insiders, in turn expelling the vampire to the position of an outsider required to assimilate.

From her formative years experimenting with photography across Europe in the 1930s, through the Spanish Civil War and her eventual exile in Mexico in 1939, to the artistic relationships that became familial in her later life, Horna's story is at once deeply personal and widely shared. It is a story of a period of history, shaped by the rise of fascism in Europe, the development of surrealism and, ultimately, the displacement of anti-fascist artists and intellectuals to countries of refuge such as Mexico.

Spanning five countries and nearly seven decades, Horna’s retrospective is no doubt an expansive curatorial undertaking, tracing the development of a photographic language in which documentary observation, political conviction and surrealism are constantly intertwined. Though comprehensive and structured across time periods, it resists treating these as discrete chapters, instead bringing into view a practice that has often been considered through its relationship to better-known figures within the surrealist movement. In doing so, Lo insólito es lo cotidiano makes a compelling case for understanding Horna's work on its own terms.

Yet, that is not to say Horna's work can be understood in isolation from the wider artistic community of which she was part, that featured better-known figures like British born surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington and Spanish surrealist painter Remedios Varo. Contemporaries but also intimate friends, her story is bound up with theirs, and the influence and presence of her creative peers are intrinsic to her deep and sprawling roots in surrealism. Calling themselves Las Tres Brujas (The Three Witches), the three women formed a close-knit creative circle and shared porous boundaries between their respective practices.

This permeation comes into view particularly in the exhibition's later rooms, where Horna's staged photographic narratives move towards the gothic and fantastical, and her creative practice takes on a new freedom following exile. In Oda a la necrofilia (Ode to necrophilia), a series made in the same year as Historia de un vampiro, Carrington poses semi-nude for Horna in a black lace mourning mantilla, accompanied by a white mask. Where the vampire series finds the uncanny in the outside world, this mock-wake brings it into the bedroom, turning the domestic into a setting for an altogether more intimate meditation on grief and mortality.

Crucially, this influence was an exchange; an untitled photograph of 1962, captured by Horna, documents Varo wearing a mask made by Carrington, offering a glimpse of the overlapping and intimate world in which the three women worked, and of the extent to which their creative lives were interlaced.

Inside "Lo insólito es lo cotidiano" ("The Unusual is the Everyday") at Palacio Bellas Artes.

Inside "Lo insólito es lo cotidiano" ("The Unusual is the Everyday") at Palacio Bellas Artes.

Unusually, Horna resisted identifying as part of a diasporic community of exile, yet through postcards, family albums and works by these fellow artists, this exhibition brings into view the relationships Horna built during her years in Mexico, and the part they played in the development and dissemination of her work. It is through this network, perhaps more than anywhere else in the exhibition, that we begin to understand what Horna meant by the cotidiana: the everyday not as the opposite of the extraordinary, but as the very place from which it emerges. The exhibition's title, in this sense, is less a curatorial conceit or guiding metaphor than a proposition about Horna’s perception of, and engagement with, the world.

Kati Horna. Untitled, from the series “Oda a la necrofilia”, (1967).

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