Mariana Castillo Deball
Stringing Beads 2
Title: Mariana Castillo Deball, Stringing Beads 2, 2025
Year: 2025
Material: glazed ceramic, wire rope
Dimensions: 29 x 9 x 9 cm
Edition: Unique, with certificate
Price: 2.000 €
Engaging with the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, a series of differently glazed ceramics was created for the exhibition Stringing Beads. Shaped as towers or in free, twisting forms, the perforated objects—threaded onto steel cables and hanging freely and fragilely—create their own shared narrative. In doing so, they reflect the dual meaning of the Greek word kosmos (κόσμος) as both ornament and (world) order: not only in terms of the laws that govern our world and can be read in jewelry (gravity, movement, weight, volume, time), but also in terms of relational structures that, as in the story of the Tower of Babel, exist in a constant state of construction and collapse. For the annual editions, the artist has assembled two specific combinations.
Mariana Castillo Deball (*1975 in Mexico City, lives in Berlin and Mexico City) studied art at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and completed a postgraduate program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Since 2015, she has been teaching sculpture at the Kunstakademie Münster. Her multifaceted practice at the intersection of art, science, history, and archaeology examines how knowledge is shaped and transformed by structures of power. Her works have been shown, among others, at HKW Berlin (2024), Pivô, São Paulo (2023), the Biennale di Venezia (2022), the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2021), and the New Museum, New York (2019). In summer 2025, she inaugurated a major art-in-architecture project for the new building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), designed by Peter Zumthor.