Caroline Mesquita's work includes sculptures, murals, large-scale installations, art in architecture as well as film and video works. Using various techniques and coloring, she creates tableaus, geometric, sometimes human-looking or animal-like creatures and reconstructions of other everyday objects from copper and brass plates. Her interest in the material of metal itself lies particularly in the fact that it can always be changed and worked on and also transforms itself independently.
Her sculptures, which already have a life of their own, mutate into characters of their own, which she constantly places in new contexts. Her works are thus characterized by a multiple performativity, whose identity is changeable, versatile and unfixable due to their materiality and contextualization. They are fluid and situational in nature - similar to Mesquita's practice, which is characterized by a lively processuality. Although she always starts from the human body, she creates animal creatures, replicas of human body parts, as well as cars, airplanes and even food, which interact with each other in a playful way. In her partly geometric formal language, she seems to find inspiration in avant-garde pioneers of the 20th century, such as Sonia Delaunay-Terk and Sophie Tauber-Arp.
Caroline Mesquita, CuCO & CO, 2024, exhibition view, HAB gallery, Nantes, photo: Jean-Christophe Lett
Exhibition arrangements and filmic works serve her as stage sets in which she creates situations that allow her sculptures to communicate and interact with each other or with her and other protagonists, such as the visitors themselves, in an artistic-theatrical performance without the use of language. Her filmic works and sculpture installations, in which human and non-human protagonists often interact tenderly with each other, thus have an inherent utopian potential for universal coexistence, although it is never entirely clear whether this is a dream or a lived reality. She is interested in creating atmospheres in which space and time seem to dissolve. Her installations and videos are therefore reminiscent of Michel Gondry's surrealist tragicomedy The Science of Sleep - Anleitung zum Träumen(2006), evoking a child's imagination and turning the normative world of today on its head.
December 4, 2024 to February 2, 2025
halle-fuer-kunst.at
