Maria Marshall

In Spring 2001, when Maria Marshall's video work “When I grow up I want to be a cooker" was shown in a group exhibition in Istanbul, a TV team refused to include this piece in their exhibition review. Depicting a small boy who with an innocent gaze and seeming pleasure enjoys a cigarette, the artist has broken a moral taboo which for the Turkish TV made its broadcast impossible. “When I grow up I want to be a cooker" (1999), Maria Marshall's first video work, has provoked great international attention. It is the beginning of a series of works in which the British artist leads the beholder into a world of abysmal fantasies and disturbing nightmares. This intrusion of the grown-up in the carefree conception of childhood life leaves the viewer with the uneasy feeling of beholding unpermitted imagery.

“Put medication in his pocket" (1999), which Maria Marshall will now also present in Germany for the first time, is the second video work dealing with the same issue. In a continuous loop a small boy the son of the artist enjoys eating an oyster. His soft lips gently bite and suck the soft meat of the mussel, his small hands facilitating the action, while his tongue licks and moistens his shiny lips. The childlike pleasure of eating the oyster is reinforced by the boys seductive, nearly erotic sensuality which seems inappropriate for a child in his age.

Likewise, Maria Marshalls latest work “When are we there?" (2000) seems like a threatening nightmare. In this work the artist herself is the main protagonist. The camera begins its journey depicting a lucid glass cupola, then slowly leading to a grand marble stair case, through a door, miraculously opened as if by magic, along a corridor into a room, dipped in warm red, in which a young woman is standing motionlessly in front of a big window. A camera close up shows her face, then slowly moves downwards over a white starched dress down to her bare feet. And suddenly, hardly visible, pulsations underneath the woman's skin become visible. While the beholder might still be wondering whether he or she has been tricked, the camera drives along the woman©ˆs body and finally perishes in the light blue of the window. Repeatingly, the beholder witnesses the camera moving through the empty house to the woman, standing statically in the room. With each loop the uncanny and seemingly inscrutable pulsation under her skin becomes stronger. But hope for an explanation is frustrated as the sequence begins anew.

The reductive means, the concentration on a short but endlessly repeating loop, the use of subtle, and disturbing imagery, manage to trigger a deeply rooted sense of uneasiness with the beholder. The precise use of cinematic techniques and a conscientious postproduction give her work an extraordinary sense of aesthetic precision, an even surface, behind which disturbing spheres are lurking. The lack of narrative, but not of tension, captures the beholder. The shortness of the sequences forces him or her, to confront the disturbing character of her imagery over and over again, always on the search of the secret, which might explain the fascination with the work.

Maria Marshall was born in Bombay in 1966, has studied in London and Geneva and currently lives and works in London. After considerable success in exhibitions in Europe and the US, her video works at Arndt & Partner are on show for the first time in Germany. Concurrently to her exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Maria Marshall also has her first solo show in a German institution, at the Kunstverein Freiburg.

Pressetext

Maria Marshall