Under the Spell (2024)

Under the Spell

Natalia Drabik & Thomas Musehold
AURA Exhibition Room / Düsseldorf

Under the Spell

In this first joint exhibition with Düsseldorf-based artists Natalia Drabik and Thomas Musehold, the two perspectives examine the unconscious, residual-religious, and mystical aspects of our society. The works open a magical space where deep collective desires engage in a contemporary dialogue with the body—shaped, veiled, and instrumentalized. Between sirens and demons, masks and artifacts, an uncanny atmosphere emerges, inviting analysis in the clinically bright exhibition space.

In Natalia Drabik's often sacral-looking paintings, femininity and the body are explored both in their vulnerability and as a means of self-empowerment. Her enigmatic portraits are an intimate engagement with the body as a projection surface for personal and collective questions. Her figures seem to elude the viewer's gaze, turning away with empty eyes to follow their own inner agenda. Drabik frequently returns to the form of the breast in her work—vulnerable and nurturing, yet simultaneously a symbol of power and conflict. In the first room, she opens her exploration with a monumental close-up of the Lupa Capitolina. The mythical she-wolf who nourished Romulus and Remus embodies an ambivalent, faceless figure: both victim and symbolic origin of a patriarchal narrative that appropriates her maternal body while elevating her to a mythological icon.

Thomas Musehold's sculptures are transformed relics of our cultural memory. He subjects these objects to an essential, almost iconoclastic metamorphosis to reveal hidden meanings. The integration of texts has evolved from an initially rudimentary approach to a central artistic practice. Musehold draws on literary and scientific references, which he—analogous to his sculptural methods—transposes into new contexts. In the thematic field of masks, Musehold stages an intricate interplay of societal phenomena and archetypes. These appear like malevolent spirits trapped in the masks, while the accompanying texts uncover their stories and interpretations. His works thus open up a multifaceted dialogue between materiality, narrative, and cultural reflection.

Photo: Johannes Bendzualla

Schrecktracht/Fright Coloration, 3D print with copper surface, 2024

Text excerpt "Schrecktracht/Fright Coloration"

Fright Coloration

Rough as bark, squirming, the piston twists in its helix—an expression of aversion. The forehead is furrowed in disapproval—hardened for all eternity, sintered Teflon. The gaze conveys a reluctance to face tomorrow, soaked in the platitudes of an eternal yesterday. And less obviously, more secretly, the teeth are bared. You want to keep your composure. But what for? The face speaks volumes: “[…] I don’t have to confirm everyone’s perception of themselves. The human right to freedom of opinion and conscience must not be undermined in favor of the psychological needs of a minority.”[1]
Gnarled proportions, jagged features are fashionable flaws of the supposedly normal. The golden mean as the center of a cult of immutability finds its strongest expression in the fetish of standardized role models, articulated through the habitus of the ordinary. Fetishism’s motives “are none other than the general belief in magic; they are rooted in the view that humans are everywhere surrounded by […] demonic influences, which express themselves in symptoms of fear toward these influences and the desire to control them [:]”[2] “[…] the paranoid subject worries about homosexuals who might be around him: the homosexual as threat. Mark McCormack explains that ‘homohysteria is defined as the cultural fear of being homosexualized’ […].”[3]
When you put on a mask, you plunge into its smooth surface. Soon, you’re flooded by delightful memories from childhood. Free of all prejudice, pointing out social differences is alien to you. Cartoonish characters appear, and playing and romping with them is great fun. More and more, though, they tease you by depriving you of your apparent privileges. The torment builds, and in “[…] every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released.”[4] You recognize the stereotypes of minorities in the characters. Pick one and from the tale of their way of life, “fantastic moments arise that derive from rites, myths, and dreams [:]”[5] orientations that spread like mental plagues, crime as ethnic predisposition, ProLife, Zwarte Piet—burn the witch. The enemy is clear, the culprit found, and the witch hunt begins.
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[1] Steinhoff, Uwe in conversation with Kissler, Alexander: “Die Rede von den vielen Geschlechtern ist letztlich nur Gerede”: Wissenschaftler werfen ARD und ZDF vor, gegen den Programmauftrag zu verstoßen (The talk around multiple genders is ultimately just talk, 6/2/2022): https://www.nzz.ch/ international/ard-und-zdf-wissenschaftler-kritisieren-trans gender-ideologie-ld.1687072. Last accessed: 6/4/2022 (unpublished English translation for this essay).

[2] Wundt, Wilhelm: “Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythos und Sitte,” in: Fetischismus. Grundlagentexte vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart, ed. by Johannes Endres. Berlin 2017, p. 69 (unpublished English translation for this essay).

[3] McCormack, Mark: The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality. Oxford 2012, p. 44, quoted in Allan, Jonathan A.: Reading from Behind. A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. Regina 2016, p. 30.

[4] Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Mask. New York 2008, p. 124.

[5] Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, ed. by Ansgar Nünning. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Weimar 2001, p. 399 (unpublished English translation for this essay).