Mimbres pottery kill hole sequence

- Installation (Installation)

Mariana Castillo Deball

location: Amsterdam & Berlin
year born: 1975
gender: female
nationality: Mexican
home town: Mexico City, Mexico

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object. They are playful and exaggerated representations of “kill hole pottery” — ceramic dishes in the Mimbres tradition with distinct circular holes located in the center of the pots. Although very little is known about the Mimbres culture’s specific beliefs, they are loosely understood to have terminated the object symbolically in preparation for funerary use. (A common belief is that kill holes served as a conduit to a spiritual world.) When these ceramics were first discovered, however, there was no scholarly precedent to explain the kill holes or differentiate them from the more common broken sherds of most ancient ceramics, so as a result hundreds of these pots were mistakenly repaired. It wasn’t until more kill hole ceramics were unearthed, and sufficient information was collected, that kill holes were understood as intentional absences, punched into the ceramics as a significant act of negation. Deball’s foregrounding of these pots in her recent project was meant to heighten the kind of leaps made around found artifacts through imagined realities, signaling the anxiety of Modernity—the irretrievable loss of information— and highlight the important work of responsibly decoding the gaps of information.


The practice of Mariana Castillo Deball (b. Mexico City, 1975) is centered on intensive research. In weaving together perceived facts and legends, the artist deconstructs how we understand tradition, liberating content from imposed ideological legacies. Mariana Castillo Deball’s collaborative research—in particular in the domain of science, geology, archaeology and literature—is manifested and synthesized into her multimodal sculptural practice. The archive is a significant aspect of the artist’s practice, whereby the research conducted in the creation of her sculptures is culminated, catalogued and preserved. Deball is not only interested in traces of the past, her multidisciplinary approach allows her to study the different ways in which a historical object can be read today.


Colors:



Karachi Series 1 (Chandra Acarya, 7:50pm, 30 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi)
© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2008

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© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2012

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Why fear the future?
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

2005

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...

Rocket
© » KADIST

Jeffrey Vallance

1978

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¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, 1 (columna alfarero)
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Mariana Castillo Deball

2015

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...

Karachi Series 1 (Chandra Acarya, 7:50pm, 30 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi)
© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2008

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...

Death at a 30 Degree Angle
© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2012

The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation...

Undocumented Intervention
© » KADIST

Julio Cesar Morales

2006

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...

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Guy Leclercq — Épures et couleurs
© » SLASH PARIS

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Guy Leclercq — Épures et couleurs
© » SLASH PARIS

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Mémoire promise #4
© » KADIST

Nidhal Chamekh

2016

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013...

Cultural Changes at the Coldest Place on Earth — A Photo Story from Yakutsk
© » LENS CULTURE

Cultural Changes at the Coldest Place on Earth — A Photo Story from Yakutsk - Photographs by Alex Vasyliev | Essay by Marigold Warner | LensCulture Feature Cultural Changes at the Coldest Place on Earth — A Photo Story from Yakutsk Photographer Alexey Vasyliev offers an intimate look into the life and changing culture of the Evens, an indigenous tribe in his hometown of Yakutsk — one of the coldest places on Earth...

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¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, 1 (columna alfarero)
© » KADIST

Mariana Castillo Deball

2015

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...

Do ut des (I give that you may give back)
© » KADIST

Mariana Castillo Deball

2009

Do ut des (2009) is part of an ongoing series of books that Castillo Deball has altered with perforations, starting from the front page and working inward, forming symmetrical patterns when each spread is opened...

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Foreigners Everywhere (Italian)
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Claire Fontaine

2006

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What a fucking wonderful audience
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Dora Garcia

2008

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The Left Hand Can't See That the Right Hand is Blind
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Douglas Gordon

2004

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Les Fleurs d’intérieur
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Danh Vo

2009

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Killed
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William E. Jones

2009

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Fairy #2
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Masaya Chiba

2011

Fairy #2 (2011) depicts a surreal scene of roughly assembled household ephemera, potted plants, and a faintly visible figure rendered in thin red line...

Hole #1
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Matthew Angelo Harrison

2015

In Hole #1 a zebra scull stands in as a representation of Africa, while the plexiglass box and the hole made through it represent the inaccessibility of that culture to African-Americans....

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Prabhakar Kamble

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