Mariana Castillo Deball - Stringing Beads, 2025

In the organizer's words:

Mariana Castillo Deball's work operates at the interface of art, science, history and archaeology. In her installations with ceramics, painting, drawing, print, sound and photography, she examines how knowledge is shaped and transformed by power structures.

Her exhibition at the Kunstverein presents drawings and ceramic works that reflect the fragility and instability of human existence: Using handmade ceramic beads threaded into a meandering modular architecture, her exhibition Stringing Beads links parallels between craft techniques and narrative processes, between the stringing of beads and the challenges of human cohesion. She contrasts the linearity of this experience of time with the rotating movement of the potter's wheel: History progresses and repeats itself. Her new installation thus creates its own cosmos that thematizes interruptions and demolitions in the passing on of narratives as well as the cycles of building up, breaking down and rebuilding from fragments.

The Greek word cosmos (κόσμος) means both jewelry and (world) order. This order not only includes things that can be used to explain the laws of our world: Movements, directions, weight, volumes, time. The cosmos as a world order also includes structures of relationships whose stability is constantly in question - and which, like the Tower of Babel, are in a constant state of construction and collapse.

Mariana Castillo Deball (*1975 in Mexico City, lives in Berlin and Mexico City) studied art at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and completed a postgraduate program at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht. She has been teaching sculpture at the Kunstakademie Münster since 2015. Her works have been part of exhibitions at HKW Berlin (2024), Pivô, São Paulo (2023), the Biennale di Venezia (2022), the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2021) and the New Museum, New York (2019), among others. In summer 2025, she opened an extensive art in architecture project for the new building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) designed by Peter Zumthor.