Markues (en)

Your Horizon Has Limits Even Holes

Duo exhibition, Scherben, 29.10. – 28.11.2021

A layer of fog occasionally spreads over the floor of the exhibition space at Scherben. It floats gently through the rods of Michaela Meises Trans Columns, rises slowly into the heights of the room, and interposes a soft blur before the watercolors in Markues’s series Für die Männer & die Anderen (For the Men & the Others). An atmosphere somewhere between fantasy film, night club, and calculated effect results, which unites the works while also making the distance between them and the viewer tangible. A similar ambiguity characterizes the Trans Columns themselves. Developed in 2009 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the sculptures transform the column, typically a symbol of stability in patriarchal society, into something mobile. Without a roof to support, they become permeable.

In their attempts to undermine the certainty and stability of meaning in patriarchal society in favor of the fluid and mercurial, both Markues and Michaela Meise have looked to the writing of feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray. The title of the exhibition, as well as one of Markues’s watercolors, Your Horizon Has Limits Even Holes, is a quotation from Irigaray’s work. Through her attention to bodily experience and engendered perception, she acknowledges the particularity of each individual without forgetting our shared connections.

Irigaray’s approach to language is mirrored in Markues’s watercolor series For the Men & the Others, in production since 2014. In each watercolor, the text is usually a quotation whose liquid script cannot be spoken, but is nevertheless open to examination. Painted in a gestural but antisubjective and deskilled fashion, the watercolors challenge the construction of subjectivity through both form and content. Because language comes from the other, it is not the subject who speaks; the subject is spoken. Alongside Markues’s watercolors hangs a ceramic relief portrait of Luce Irigaray made by Michaela Meise.

It depicts the philosopher reading a book — as she did while modeling for the portrait. On the 21st of November, there will be several readings in the exhibition space. During the readings, three sculptures by Michaela Meise will be installed for use as seating: Cheshire Cat and two Cheshire Kittens (all 2013). The exhibition is also accompanied by a commissioned text by Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju titled “The Lawn,” a poetic collage rethinking the concept of intuition.