Tears don't burn

It all begins with objects that hold. A blanket holds warmth. A refrigerator preserves nourishment. An egg holder protects what is fragile. A leather jacket carries the shape of a body long after it has been worn. Monika Grabuschnigg’s sculptures draw on systems of containment, protection, and care. Not as promises of safety, but as fragile structures through which contemporary life attempts to sustain itself. The exhibition at Kunstraum Remise Bludenz unfolds as a space of transition. Solid casts of minibar interiors, blankets transformed into ceramic shells, pharmaceutical packaging, artificial tears, egg trays, worn leather surfaces marked by time. These are objects all designed to maintain, preserve, stabilize, or prolong life. Yet in Grabuschnigg’s works they often appear emptied, estranged, suspended between function and memory. Familiar domestic forms become uncanny. Estrangement, in the sense of a subtle shift in perception, is central to the exhibition. A refrigerator door usually opened unconsciously in familiar places such as your own, your parents or friends home becomes a strange voyeuristic threshold. The blanket, associated with softness, intimacy and rest, appears hardened and fossilized. Plastic packaging and artificial eye drops are preserved through aluminium casts usually associated with permanence and historical memory. The ordinary world is not abandoned but made newly visible. We sense a return to liminal spaces, to spaces we inhabit or use only temporarily before abandoning them again. The hotel minibar is a space that is private yet anonymous, intimate yet transient. It is not fully domestic, but it imitates domesticity. It promises comfort while simultaneously emphasizing displacement. Such transitional spaces mirror a broader contemporary condition in which identities, relationships, and bodies are increasingly shaped by mobility, precarity, and the demand for constant functionality. Care appears throughout the works as both necessity and burden. To care means to hold, store, preserve, maintain, protect, worry. Yet these systems of care also reveal exhaustion. Artificial tears become a recurring motif not only as medical objects, but as technologies of emotional maintenance that allow the body to continue functioning despite fatigue or affective overload. Crying here does not signify mental collapse alone, but release – a soft refusal of the pressure to constantly hold oneself together. Motifs such as refrigerator seals, egg trays, tears, pharmaceutical containers, or deadly nightshades recur throughout Grabuschnigg’s practice. Here, repetition is not merely a formal strategy, but rather an existential condition. Industrial processes like casting and decal transfer reinforce this repetition, translating disposable materials into durable sculptural forms. The works oscillate between preservation and decay, extension and erosion. The surface of the old leather jacket functions as a “second skin” retaining the memory of gestures, protection, and exposure. Grabuschnigg’s “jacket of devotion” becomes a testimony of time, an object that absorbs history while simultaneously shielding the body from the world. In this sense, protection always contains vulnerability within it. The deadly nightshade “Belladonna” appears as another ambivalent figure. Historically associated with healing, toxicity, witchcraft, hallucination, and feminine beauty, the plant occupies a space between medicine and poison, preservation and danger. In the artist’s work, belladonna becomes a symbol for altered states and liminal zones. Its presence resonates with the exhibition’s broader atmosphere of suspension and transformation. Literary references further shape this emotional landscape, particularly the writings of Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, whose phrase “Tears don’t burn except in solitude” gives the exhibition one of its conceptual anchors. Rather than illustrating pessimism directly, her works translate emotional states such as melancholy and solitude into surfaces, objects, and spatial atmospheres. Between preservation and decay, intimacy and estrangement, Monika Grabuschnigg’s works hold traces of bodies, memories, and emotions, revealing the fragile systems of care through which contemporary life is continuously maintained.