Frankfurter Kunstverein

Frankfurter Kunstverein presents the first comprehensive show by Pauline M’barek (born 1979 in Cologne), which unites various works from her diverse oeuvre. Working largely with multimedia installations of videos, objects, and drawings, the artist addresses the ambivalence inherent to our perceptions of reality. Her subjects of investigation can include the senses themselves—sight, hearing, or touch—as well as the objects or media in or through which an apparently authentic reality is manifested. These may include the frame of a picture, a display case, or the fastenings of an object. How many dimensions are produced in the tying of a knot? And how would a knot perceive the process of its own making? The artist explores such questions in her precise observations of bows, knots, drapery, and swirls, which she interprets as signs of the transition from the flat surface to three-dimensional space.

M’barek’s observations interrupt accustomed processes of perception; they analyze their conditions of possibility and the line between knowing and perception, the observer and the observed, the shown and the hidden. Many works by the artist have the appearance of topologies, in which the usual relationship between subject and object is inverted. M’barek’s works produce an encounter between spatial relationships, political histories, optical phenomena, and constructive conditions. For example, her installation “Trophäenhalter” (Trophy Holder) (2011) points to a dark chapter in the history of colonialism through the presentation of empty wall mounts for cultic masks. These simple metal sculptures suggest the unseen and reverse sides of museum artifacts, which often bear stamps or inscriptions and which are invested with meaning as objects of research, attention, and categorization.