Cinthia Marcelle
Disobedient Tools

The Marta Herford shows the first survey exhibition of the internationally renowned artist Cinthia Marcelle (*1974 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil) in the German speaking region. Since the late 1990s, she has been critically examining established and hierarchising social structures that organize our everyday interactions in videos, sculptures, photographs, installations, and performances.

In order to break down entrenched mechanisms and forms of organisation and negotiate new ones, Marcelle relies on methods of collective action: the artist initiates situations designed as collaborative-performative actions. In doing so, she passes on control and authorship of the form and narrative of her works to others chosen by her.

At the centre of the exhibition “Disobedient Tools” is the installation “Family in Disorder” (2018), composed of a conceptually determined selection of locally traded materials such as bricks, barrels, chalk, stones, shoelaces, matchboxes, cotton fabric and more. Half of the building materials form an accurate, space-dividing, static barricade in one room. In contrast, the second half of the material is staged over six days by museum employees without external aids. The completed installation represents, in a figurative sense, the formalised product of the collaborative negotiation process and condenses into an impressively artistic formal language, which, however, was not created by the artist as a genius but as a process.

Thank you

Exhibition benefactor