Monika Grabuschnigg, Symptomatic Relief (Antwerp), 2024, Courtesy the Artist - foto © Ju Aichinger
Monika Grabuschnigg, Symptomatic Relief (Antwerp), 2024, Courtesy the Artist - Photo © Léonard Pongo
More about this work
Aluminium castings of pieces of church furniture come together with objects often found in refrigerators: egg holders, eye drops, blister packaging... A long insulation strip and a large bow made from a carrying strap complete the installation.
Grabuschnigg’s work interrogates the notion of time, and human desires, needs, and sorrows that its passing awakens. Using the fridge as a metaphor, she investigates methods of preservation and self-collection. Recognizable household objects thus become symbolic mediators between loss, care, self-keeping and decay.
In previous works, the artist was concerned with a kind of endemic, domestic, personal melancholia; this new work shifts attention to the collective and ritualistic. While released from an obvious religious heft, reduced to fragments and decorated with mundane items, the pews in the installation tap into a different type of unresolved longing – one that may find a more apt satisfaction within the realms of sociality, history and our communal past.
Number 27 on the map.
Park map and walking route
