Redemption, Maybe
REDEMPTION, MAYBE
MARIONA BERENGUER
18 May – 28 July, 2024
Contemplating Mariona Berenguer’s current cycle of works, a line resounds in my mind: “With my burnt hand, I write about the nature of fire.” As a guiding thread, it runs through Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina whose unnamed female narrator explores the existential dimensions of her role as both a writer and a woman. To me, this line encapsulates the impossibility and yet the imperative to develop effective aesthetic means to reflect on, and therefore to confront, the conditions and circumstances of artistic production from within the realm of art itself.
In a poetic and critical manner and through sculptural, textile, graphic, and installative methods, Mariona Berenguer examines the position of (artistic) labour in our society. Today, work no longer serves merely to secure livelihoods and satisfy needs, but acts as a source of self-esteem and self-fulfilment. Productivity is considered as a means of redemption from financial debt as well as from spiritual and societal failings. Against this background, Redemption, Maybe probes the value and belief systems that underpin our work culture and evokes the creative, physical, and expressive forces that come to haunt it.
In the installation Frohes neues Jahr (Happy new year), the contorted remains of two burnt rubbish containers bear witness to the raw forces unleashed on New Year’s Eve in Neukölln. Transformed into monochrome objects, they symbolise both an act of defiance and a moment of catharsis. Their bodily presence resonates with the diptych Overall 12/13 (Doppelblau), two work overalls that Mariona Berenguer unravelled into individual strips of fabric and reweaved into wall tapestries. Through this painstaking production process, the artist not only makes visible the energy and time invested in industrial work, but also imbues the garments with her own artistic labour and inserts them into a new system of meaning and value.
The concept of redemption is a key element in religious traditions and often achieved through labour, true to the principle of “ora et labora”. The installation Latin Locutions (ora et labora) alludes to this conjunction of faithful dedication and diligence, embedding elements of confessionals, such as kneeling benches and lattice windows, in a structure of building blocks. On the one hand, the installation invites visitors to emulate the act of confession; on the other hand, its open and light structure exposes this intimate moment. Mariona Berenguer thus plays with the human desire for a belief system to hold on to and the fear of finding it empty at its core. This takes another ironic turn in combination with A/P (Artist’s Proof), a negative pregnancy test which alludes to the difficulty of reconciling the commitment required for both working as an artist and being a mother. The interplay between object and title challenges our understanding of success and failure in both artistic production and sexual reproduction.
Working as an artist often necessitates taking on other forms of work to sustain one’s own creative practice and livelihood. Testimony to this are Overall 18-22, reflective vests that have been worn by artists in their bread-and-butter jobs and that become the source material for Mariona Berenguer’s textile series. In a similarly subversive and playful manner, Falling Stars turns the ashy imprints left by nervous cigarette breaks into celestial constellations that hold the promise of future fortunes. In doing so, the artist shifts attention to the by-products of artistic practice and explores the poetic potential of creative blockade.
Just as the burnt hand comes to write about the nature of fire, so the conditions and circumstances of artistic production come to provide the very aesthetic means for Mariona Berenguer to reflect and confront them. In this sense, productivity may indeed be considered as a way of redemption. This relentless feedback loop seems to be epitomised in the comma in the exhibition’s title that is not only charged with hope and doubt, but also signifies an act of emancipation by letting go of the question.
Lisa Deml