Curated by Valérie Miles and Juan Insua

Despite the abundance of material by Roberto Bolaño published since his death in 2003, no full-length critical biography of the Chilean-born writer has yet appeared. Readers have been left to comb his novels and essays for tantalizing clues as to who the writer might have been and how much or little he actually shared with Arturo Belano, the alter ego we meet in The Savage Detectives and other Bolaño books. It’s in this investigatory spirit that Miles and Insua have assembled “Bolaño Archive.” Spanning the twenty-six years the writer resided in Spain, the show promises a coherent chronology of the writer’s life, ingeniously replicating—by way of an intricate kaleidoscopic layout—the excitement of reading Bolaño’s work. Viewers will be challenged to navigate trapdoors and clues through an impressive collection of notebooks, letters, personal photos, zines, board games, novels, poems, and as-yet-unpublished material from the writer’s estate.

— Chris Kraus