The work of Mariana Castillo Deball situates itself at the intersections of art, science, history and archaeology. Her installations feature sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, sound, and photography, exploring the way in which knowledge is shaped and transformed through power structures.
In her exhibition Stringing Beads, she presents new drawings and ceramics that reflect on the fragility and instability of human existence: handmade ceramic beads, threaded into a meandering, modular architecture, draw parallels between craft techniques and narrative processes. The artist contrasts this linear experience of time with the rotating movement of the potter's wheel: history both progresses and repeats itself. Her installation thus creates its own cosmos, addressing interruptions and breaks in the transmission of history and—as in the Tower of Babel—the cycles of construction, collapse, and reconstruction.
The Greek word kosmos (κόσμος) means both adornment and (world) order. This order on the one hand encompasses objects that can be used to describe the laws of our world: movements, directions, weight, volumes, time. The cosmos as world order on the other hand also encompasses relationship structures whose stability is again and again being called into question.
