Mariana Castillo Deball

Mariana Castillo Deball was born in Mexico City in 1975, and lives between Amsterdam and Berlin since completing her research at the Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht) in 2003. Her recent projects and exhibitions include Between you and the image of you that reaches me at Koelnischer Kunstverein, Migros Museum, Kaleidoscopic Eye at the Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, DO UT DES Objectif_exhibitions, Antwerp, Belgium, These Ruins You See at the Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; Interlude: the reader’s traces, an intervention in public libraries in Paris, Berlin and New York; Institute of Chance at the International Institute of Social Studies, Amsterdam; The Last Piece of John Fare, GB Agency, Paris; Blackboxing at Project Art Center, Dublin; and 10 Defining Experiments at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami. Together with Irene Kopelman started uqbar, a space to develop collaborative projects.

In the last years my practice is based in a kaleidoscopic approach to language, in the sense that different disciplines and ways of describing the world collide with each other, generating a polyphonic voice. Another important aspect is the dialogue with institutions and museums, not necessarily linked to contemporary art, which whom I establish collaborations in different ways. In that sense the contemporary art space becomes a point in a series of relations between other spaces of knowledge.
Putting an accent in the exchange process rather than on what is being exchanged, my work takes a journey through archaeology, science, literature, and technology to observe that the principle of reciprocity is never equal, that every exchange implies a transformation of all the parties involved.