Mariana Castillo Deball.
Parergon September 20, 2014 - March 1, 2015
Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of the Present

The artist Mariana Castillo Deball (*1975 in Mexico City), who was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize in 2013, is showing a project developed specifically for her solo exhibition in the Historical Hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof. The expansive installation brings together various artistic considerations at the interface between historical research, philosophy and art, which are crucial to the work of Mariana Castillo Deball. For her work, she specifically selects thematic areas and transfers the developed research process, reminiscent of methods from archaeology, ethnography and the history of science, into a contemporary artistic formal language. Things that have been forgotten are put into new contexts in order to create tangible images and alternative readings.

For the show at Hamburger Bahnhof, the artist is devoting herself to the “biographies of things”.
She focuses her attention on museum collection objects that often “had an unstable life wandering between backyards, cellars, pedestals, showcases, museums, traveling exhibitions and private collections” (Mariana Castillo Deball). The focus of the presentation is on objects and works of art from various Berlin museums, but especially those that were connected to the Nationalgalerie collection at different times. As the title of the exhibition “Parergon” (accessory, ancillary work) suggests, the history of the collections, their buildings, exhibits and protagonists is examined and deciphered, particularly with regard to their migrations and reorganizations. Castillo Deball pays particular attention to connections that take place outside the framework of the known and the unambiguous.

What influence the museum institution and its representatives have on the life and status of the objects is a guiding question for the artist's considerations. The subject of the installation is less the actual results of the heavily research-based project. Rather, it is about developing a sensually tangible situation in which the artist combines her own, newly developed works with historical exhibits. New narratives and cross-connections that emerge between the various objects, historical turning points and chance events provide Mariana Castillo Deball with the material for her own artistic interventions. She “wants to create a kind of opera in which a repertoire of objects, buildings and architectural reconstructions appear as the main characters” (Mariana Castillo Deball). These different characters tell a “stage play” in the museum, in which the paths they took in the past and the adventures they lived determine the dramaturgy of the exhibition.

As a further level of her opera, the artist has created a radio piece that gives the visitor insights into the previous research process in the form of an audio guide. The voices of specialists, contemporary witnesses and fictional characters are heard here, sharing very individual perspectives and experiences with visitors that are related to the complex history of the Hamburger Bahnhof, the collection of the Nationalgalerie and the exhibits shown in the exhibition.