Monica Bonvicini

chouakri brahms berlin, Berlin
Through October 5

The title of Monica Bonvicini’s solo show in Berlin, Add Elegance To Your Poverty, refers to a type of “nobility” that the artist has conferred upon certain materials used by the anti-global demonstrators during the G8 summit in Genoa, such as chains and metal pipes, and words cut out of pattern paper.

One installation is a structure made of metal tubes, chains knotted together to form a neat grille, and broken panes of glass, demolished by a continuous avalanche of hurled rocks. This compound, entitled Stone Wall, possesses a morbid, sexual, and sado-masochistic feel that evokes the atmosphere of an S&M dungeon. The work also incorporates the L-shaped wall at the center of the gallery that separates the working space from the expositive space and, by rendering the actual art space inaccessible to the public, it thus alludes to controlled zones in general, as well as to airport gates or customs zones that are becoming increasingly difficult to navigate.

On the other side of the partition covered by Stone Wall, hangs another work, Kill Your Father, made out of sixty-three asymmetrically organized panels, upon which the artist prompts us with lines from the ’80s pop-rock lyrics. The expressions, written in a blazing red and enclosed by frames of the same color, are sometimes offered up with the subject and predicate inverted, and the viewer’s task is to reconstruct the phrases from their own memory of rock’n’roll jargon.

Simultaneously revolutionary, violent, anarchic, and naïve, the quotations aim their fire at the established structures and social order, while also revealing themselves to be vaguely misogynistic. In spite of the severity of some of the expressions and the anonymity of the signs, the overall effect, held together by decorative elements that reproduce chains, is one of an aesthetically harmonious whole.

Beyond the walls of the gallery, across the river, the artist has erected a fake advertising panel Vorwärts, und nicht vergessen (Forward, and don’t forget, 2000), which reproduces the figure, identifiable with a famous tobacco multinational, of a mounted cowboy, his right arm raised, his fist closed.

Bonvicini talks about her work in the post-World Trade Center context: is it possible to maintain an anarchic and rebellious spirit and, if the answer is in the affirmative, what significance should it assume? A difficult question to answer. What is certain, is that her output, intellectual, pop, and glamour all at the same time, is injected with a healthy dose of irony that allows one to face the present from a variety of viewpoints.




Marina Sorbello
Translation by Amanda Coulson