Kunstpreis Böttcherstraße

Group-exhibition Kunsthalle Bremen / 2016

In Pauline M'barek´s black and white video work Semiophores (2013), hands in white archival gloves touch and examine various black objects. These objects are in danger of becoming invisible in front of the black background; their form and materiality can only be reconstructed by observing the searching movement of the hands. These items, actually common flea market articles, appear to be valuable exotic artefacts and become symbols - semiophores - of an imagined Other. The sounds that are geneerated open an acoustic space that leads one to imagine the various material surfaces of the objects.

In her installation Relics (2016), several sand-coloured casts, reminders of archaeological finds, are placed on a fragile display structure made of steel and glass. The amorphous, root-like sculptures are casts of the gaps that digging hands left in clay. They are materialisations - relics - of unearthing and revealing movements in times past. Pauline M'barek focuses not on the object of the search but, instead, places the archaeological procedure itself radically at the centre. In contrast to the video, the object the hands are groping for remains entirely invisible, whilst the underground search movement of the subject are made sculpturally visible. This play of positive and negative, space and hull, form and empty shell questions perception and is a reference to its relativity.