Mimbres pottery kill hole sequence
- Installation (Installation)
Mariana Castillo Deball
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:
Related works featuring themes of: » Artist as Ethnographer, » Collecting and Modes of Display, » Collective History, » Contemporary Archaeological, » Mexican
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2008The 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 ...
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2012The 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...
© » KADIST
Minerva Cuevas
2006During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects...
© » KADIST
Yoshua Okón
2015Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
© » KADIST
Jeffrey Vallance
1978Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel...
© » KADIST
Adrian Villar Rojas
2010The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies)...
© » KADIST
Carlos Amorales
2014Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance...
© » KADIST
Charwei Tsai
2008Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo...
© » KADIST
Jonathan Hernández
2008In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
© » KADIST
Julio Cesar Morales
2006Julio 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...
© » KADIST
Agnieszka Kurant
2022For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...
© » KADIST
Gabriel Kuri
2010Gabriel Kuri has created a series of works in which he juxtaposes perennial and ephemeral materials...
© » KADIST
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga
2013Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions...
© » KADIST
Simon Starling
2007Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
© » KADIST
Agnieszka Kurant
2018Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film...
© » KADIST
Julieta Aranda
2016The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
© » KADIST
Julio Cesar Morales
2008The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...