SYMPTOMATIC RELIEF

SYMPTOMATIC RELIEF, a solo exhibition by Monika Grabuschnigg, explores the human urge towards preservation: the storage of everyday foods; the care of the skin, body and health; the attempts to save and savour our time and attention, against a capitalist system that wants to take as much of it as it can. Cold Storage (2023-ongoing) and Compartments (2023-ongoing) use the metaphor of refrigeration to examine the ways in which the more ephemeral areas of our private lives are preserved. As a kind of household archive, refrigerators not only serve to slow the decay of food, medicine or chemicals, they also provide a snapshot of their users through the items stored within them – or absent from them. In an extension of this role of preserving everyday consumables, the clay-cast insides of refrigerator doors and shelves in SYMPTOMATIC RELIEF become vehicles for an introspective examination of the individual. Placed on glazed forms are relics of transient, ephemeral life – photographs of cut flowers, empty liquor bottles, sunglasses; blister packs and aluminum casts of storage containers – embodying traces of absence or impermanence. At the same time, they testify to consumption and (mis)use as both “harmful” and pleasurable indulgences of the body, offering a counter-narrative to the promise of pristine preservation. A wooden seat that, as a readymade, reveals deep traces of wear and tear, similarly unmasks the “abrasion” that otherwise often remains hidden behind masquerades. As an artist, Grabuschnigg is not interested in concealing longing, loss, or imperfection. She chooses to preserve these conditions as essential and productive aspects of her practice, and of life itself. Approaching archiving and conservation as techniques for collecting and preserving the unpolished fractures and vulnerabilities we encounter, SYMPTOMATIC RELIEF asks us to consider what it might mean to lean into the disintegration; to embrace the entropy that will come to every atom of ourselves.