ART-PRESENTATION: Monica Bonvicini-Her Hand Around The Room
Monica Bonvicini’s work isn’t the easiest to understand. The Italian-born sculptor, painter and installation artist makes work always establish a strong connection with the sites where they are exhibited and investigates the relationships between architecture, control, gender, space, surveillance, and power, though there’s a lot of humour and ambiguity in her work too.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Peter Kilchmann Archive
The exhibition “Her hand around the room” includes work from throughout Monica Bonvicini’s career alongside those that have been specially commissioned. The exhibition architecture itself also received the artists’ treatment. Works such as “Light me Black” 2009, made from 144 florescent lights which temporarily overpowers the viewer with its bright light, and “Scale of Things (to come)” (2010), a staircase of chains and steel pipes, tread a fine line between the beautiful and the sinister. A significant body of drawing also is included. Her work creates a powerful and critical discourse through which she deconstructs gender, power, architecture and their role within our modern, urban environment. Often working with industrial subjects, such as a glass-walled public toilet and S&M-inspired materials such as black latex, chains and rubber, her work is mesmerising and powerful as well as sinister and full of subliminal energy. While not as participatory, the work “NOT FOR YOU”, (2007), confronts viewers just as directly, in metres-high illuminated letters attached to a steel scaffolding the title of the work is emblazoned across two walls in the otherwise empty exhibition room. The lettering was not illuminated by neon light, but rather the surfaces of the oversized letters contained two rows of light bulbs which lit up garishly in a rhythm. With both verbal brutality and conceptual subtleness Monica Bonvicini hinted at a class society in the cultural sphere in which contemporary art has become an exclusive status symbol of an at once hermetic and elite circle. The work addresses the problem of the role of the viewer, as well as the function of the exhibition space, which, despite the fact that there was nothing on the floor, seemed overloaded by the size and bright light of the lettering. In her series “Leather Tools”, (2004-09), Bonvicini had different tools clad with black leather and thus transformed them, due to the purely associative power of the material, into a fetish. The sense of dormant power is evident in “Latent Combustion” (2015) comprising chainsaws and an axe hung in a bundle from the ceiling and covered in dripping black polyurethane. In being hung up like the sword of Damocles, these dangerous objects collectively assume the appearance of a historic relic or fossil that has been dredged out of the bottom of a tar pit. Whilst this renders them harmless, neutered and emasculated, they retain a menacing aura.
Info: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead, Duration 18/11/16-2/2/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:30-18:00, www.balticmill.com
