On the Exploration of Identity

In 2021, as the first pandemic of the global age was taking hold, visual artist Marenka Gabeler was making work that she would later come to frame around the theme of Motherhood. As the virus extended through cities, countries and continents, the dimensions of one’s own world shrunk and became ever atomised. In lockdowns, with businesses shut and travel suspended, people were only able to interact with those in their own household. Accordingly, the focus of Gabeler’s work became home and family: the buildings and trees she came across on cycle rides with her children around the empty city; her two sons playing and sleeping within the four walls of their house.

There is a strong dualism at play in this body of work. What at first may seem calm or playful, can on closer look seem menacing or dark: intimacy can become captivity, a game can turn dangerous. One such example is Asleep and Trees, fifteen monochrome ink drawings and photographs arranged in a vertical grid which echoes the configuration of photos on a smartphone screen. The images in the grid could be grouped into two – sleeping children and trees – and they are interspersed. There is a striking parity between the motionless bodies of the children and the trees: they both have trunks, of course, but similarly limbs correspond with branches. Further, the dozing children could have been captured in a moment of calm, but is it a calm before a storm? Or could the sprawled inanimate figures be recumbent dead? Trees are readily associated with wellbeing and with familial connections, yet historically they have been sites of violence as well. Francisco de Goya’s anti-war series ‘The Disasters of War’ (1809–14) comes to mind here. Many of these etchings depict naked bodies (often dismembered), their eyes closed, tied to or spiked on trees; yet the sure hand and harmonious compositions seem to belie the true horror of these scenes. The dozing children are also in a state reminiscent of Goya’s etching The sleep of reason produces monsters (1796–8), which portrays the darker aspects of one’s psyche escaping while the reasonable slumber.

A sense of precarious balance emerges in another photographic piece from this body of work: a photographic triptych comprising two colour prints and one black-and-white. The colour pieces each give a head-on view of a large length of plastic or fabric obscuring the face and body of one of the children, while the third is taken from above and shows one child curled up in a large, clear plastic storage box, while his brother plays beside him. Here again there is a sense of danger – in each scenario there is the potential for the game to go too far, the possibility of suffocation or entrapment. There is also a strong performative element to each photograph, which sets it in dialogue with Erwin Wurm’s series One Minute Sculptures (1988–ongoing). Each piece in Wurm’s series is a type of live study: it involves a different person following an instruction to interact with an everyday object and hold that pose for one minute, which the artist then records as a photograph, video or performance. In contrast, Gabeler’s children created their poses and scenarios spontaneaously, which is testament to their freedom of spirit and to the artist’s enduring creativity in the face of an unstable and uncertain world.

This performative aspect is a continuation of the live element that has run through Gabeler’s artistic practice for over two decades and which has allowed her to study the nature of identity in a direct and experiential way. For a period of two weeks during her MA studies, the artist wore everywhere an unadorned plaster cast she had made of her face, in a performance titled The Mask (2006). The project also included her documenting in a diary her impressions of being the wearer of the mask and of being observed – of at once concealing her identity and drawing attention to herself and to what may lay behind the blank disguide. This artistic questioning of selfhood had already begun eight years earlier, in School Uniform (1998). Having arrived in the UK from the Netherlands for a year-long study exchange programme, the artist embarked on a durational performance, spanning the entire year, in which she reflected upon her own sense of identity – gender, age, nationality, and more – and of otherness, by way of wearing the very British garments daily and keeping a journal detailing people’s responses to her appearance. Additionally, the writing of personal notes alongside photographic documentation of durational first-hand experiences chimes with Sophie Calle’s practice of intimate–forensic research into her mind and others’.

Just as in Wum’s performative sculptures and in Calle’s suggestive detective works, so in Gabeler’s three performative works, time – or more precisely duration – is an artistic medium used in conjunction with a variety of others. In Gabeler’s case, employing these media together allows her to open up questions of identity in the round, much like the way it is constructed and reconstructed continually in life.