Institut Ramon LLull

Catalan Artist Mariona Berenguer, guest at Berlin's GlogauAIR residency

Arts.  BERLIN, 22/03/2021




Mariona Berenguer

Trained at Massana School in Barcelona in the speciality of sculpture, she concludes this stage with an honourable mention in the project “La Grieta. Espai Entre” which will be exhibited later in a solo show (Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona). She then teaches sculpture, drawing and moulds in different art centres and graduates in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. She takes part in group exhibitions at LafuturA gallery (Barcelona), Fine Arts Academy (Sabadell), History Museum (Sant Feliu de Guíxols), TEDxBarcelonaWomen, San Salvador Monastery (Burgos), Maristany Art Centre and Es-Fiera 72 (Sant Cugat). In 2018, his work is selected for the XXI Biennial of Catalan Contemporary Art, where he presents Metástasi(s), an audiovisual installation with a performative extension in the company of the pianist Lucía Fumero. In 2019 she takes part in the Loop festival in Barcelona with an audiovisual installation in collaboration with the sound artist Juan Segura and a group exhibition in Kunsthaus Bethanien, the historical centre of art in Berlin. This last year she has been selected for the Felicia Fuster Foundation grants with the interactive installation About desire, a project with which she starts in the field of robotics and which she has exhibited in Monopol during this year’s BerlinArtweek and which is on show at the catalan foundation until February next year

THE EMPTY NEST

The project presented at GlogauAIR is part of an ongoing investigation into the subject of desire. Following this continuing line of development, the exhibition is comprised of a series of works that explore the notions of need and longing, and the complex emotional, philosophical, and conceptual positions surrounding these topics. In many ways, the works consider this theme from various perspectives, from the quietly personal to the ostensibly physically detached, allowing for an examination that encompasses or takes into account both our inner and outer environments. Buying flowers in the Berlin underground to bring “life” inside your home, simulating natural sunlight, or observing flocks of animals in the countryside through the use of a drone are some of the various actions that activate and inform the works included.

Taking into account a diversity of positions, the presence of both natural and technological elements act as a conductive thread throughout the exhibition.  The use of animals or plants is presented as a symbolic resource to address the most basic needs—emotions and instincts in it’s most essential state, with no other pretension other than survival. Technology, on the other hand, appears as a substitute tool that forces processes, creates rhythms and palliates impossibility. Animals, plants and technology are all elements that are part of us, but can appear as extreme otherness. This challenges us in terms of what we identify with most, and that which begins to define us. Nature and artifice lose strength as dual elements, but they create duality in our own position. This classically understood or intrinsic tension between these “worlds” provides a foundation or framework in which the viewer can reflect on their own perspectives of need and longing, and how we as cultures or individuals understand and rationalize that which brings about these feelings.  But in the end, and returning to the first impulse, this becomes an intimate reflection on life in the city, of strategies for solitude and the inherent melancholy connected to lack of light.

Further info: https://glogauair.net/guest-resident/mariona-berenguer/

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