Exhibition Text

Molten, the new solo exhibition by Céline Mathieu at Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin, considers what is already there and what is brought in, as a living infrastructure, which can resist, capacitate, and induce. Material from former exhibitions at Kunsthall Trondheim (NO) and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (DE), find their way into this one, daisychaining exhibitions.


"Rubén explained to me that during the Industrial Revolution, new machinery would cause eyeballs to shake in their sockets, resulting in blurry vision and possibly conjuring the appearance of ghosts. The specific frequency is hard to generate and equally hard to capture.

The air is thinned out in here too, with works like beads, insulators, spacers, or nodes, interspersing a rhythm, like an odd poem affords the exhibition space. Was it by coincidence that current and currency sound similar? What’s curation got to do with it?

An electromagnetic field is spun between the chips, ESP32s. One of them sends out a signal through that field so they blink simultaneously. The coder told me that sometimes the message doesn’t come through.

The machines from E-Werke, the electricity plant that used to be housed here, were cooled with water from the nearby lake, I heard. The tubing is still there, under the Kunstverein, sometimes flooding the cellar, the machines long gone. And from the famous Schloss, many reports have pointed to the presence of ghosts in there.

Little sheets of investment gold are glued with dentist’s enamel and hung high up on the wall. Brought along as a gift from a previous exhibition at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, it is a material reserve held in trust for future production, to be melted and turned into money when needed.

Aluminium ingots I got sponsored for a Norwegian show of local premium produce ought to, according to my concept for them, be remelted until sold. Whether that was worth the price remained on the table. Until MT bought the work, unmelted, over lunch. The shape it ought to be melted into—the shape of an enlarged molten drop of aluminium—was sculpted in plasticine with interning assistant Emilija.

Empty trays were posted all the way from the U.S. via Jamaica to be here. As I found their traces of use inimitable, desire won from the horror of shipping.

Twenty years ago, my boyfriend photographed his rabbit, a Vale van Bourgondië, on the very table I am sitting at, writing this. His body still small, he uploaded it to Wikipedia, where the image remains to this day, representing that breed. The picture now subtitles the show as a postcard and a poster.

Borrowed discarded robots from the Institute for Mechatronics in Mechanical Engineering M-4, Ligeti Center, lay in the back. A knee bends around the corner, and I learned that remanence is the name for residual magnetism left in a core after the field is removed.

A book of commissioned fiction will be published as a posthumous Reader for this exhibition."

– Céline Mathieu