Mariana Castillo Deball

The work of Mariana Castillo Deball (born in 1975, lives in Berlin and Mexico City) situates itself at the intersections of art, science and archaeology. Her installations feature sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, sound, and photography, exploring the way in which knowledge is shaped and transformed through power structures.

In her exhibition Stringing Beads, she presents new drawings and ceramics that reflect on the fragility and instability of human existence: handmade ceramic beads, threaded into a meandering, modular architecture, draw parallels between craft techniques and narrative processes. The artist contrasts this linear experience of time with the rotating movement of the potter's wheel: history both progresses and repeats itself. With this in mind, her installation creates its own cosmos and addresses interruptions and breaks in the transmission of history and—as in the Tower of Babel—the cycles of construction, collapse, and reconstruction. 

The Greek word kosmos (κόσμος) means both adornment and (world) order. This order on the one hand encompasses objects that can be used to describe the laws of our world: movements, directions, weight, volumes, time. The cosmos as world order on the other hand also encompasses relationship structures whose stability is again and again being called into question today.

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, Maastricht. Since 2015, she has been teaching sculpture at the Kunstakademie Münster. Her works have been included in exhibitions at, among others, HKW Berlin (2024), Pivô, São Paulo (2023), the Biennale di Venezia (2022), Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (2021), and the New Museum, New York (2019). In the summer of 2025, she inaugurated a large-scale Kunst am Bau project for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) building designed by Peter Zumthor.

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