Mariella Mosler: Anna, Bella, Clivia, … Violetta

29 November 2026 to 28 February 2027

Mariella Mosler, Love Hearts IV, A silver cast of a potato © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2026

Mariella Mosler’s (*1962) new exhibition centres on migration. The artist is interested in the theme as a structure rather than as an event – a structure that shapes people, plants and forms in equal measure.

It begins with potatoes – once brought from the Andes to Europe, where they became a staple food and a political issue – which have been cast in silver and transformed from ephemeral objects into precious ones. The casting process reveals a mechanism that runs through the entire exhibition: added value arises through appropriation and reinterpretation.

Mariella Mosler, Rope Follies #1, 2024-2026, Room installation, print on flag fabric, 300 x 200 cm, Sakura Gallery Nagoya, Japan © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2026

In a large collage, Mariella Mosler » interweaves immigration forms with private notes: administrative language that forces people into categories stands alongside personal expressions that allude to existential issues. Belonging and exclusion are explored here.

In a large-scale installation, an old lasso takes centre stage, found in the home of a border patrol officer in Marfa, Texas. Organised into loops and printed onto transparent panels of fabric, the image shifts between a mask, a Rorschach test and an ornament. An instrument of control becomes an open visual symbol, whilst the fabric itself becomes a walk-in space.

Mariella Mosler, Portrait © Martin Lebioda

A wall of masks explores the theme of ‘primitivism’ – with reference to André Breton’s Paris studio, where ethnographic objects from colonial contexts became icons of the European avant-garde. Mosler reverses this process: she transforms baskets from low-wage countries back into their original form as water hyacinth, supplemented with packaging material and plastic film. Value creation, exploitation and the production of ‘authenticity’ prove to be closely intertwined – both in the ethnographic collection and in the museum.

Mariella Mosler’s work explores the ‘social fabric’ – the weaves and structures that hold societies together or tear them apart. Migration is no exception here, but rather a fundamental condition of nature and culture – and raises the question of who decides what remains, what migrates, and who is thereby declared a foreign body.

Curator: Dr Jutta Moster-Hoos