NINA BEIER: "Casts"

NINA BEIER

"CASTS"

Museo Tamayo, Mexico City  / 23.05.-29.09.2024

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Casts brings together an arrangement of sculptures and performances by artist Nina Beier (b. 1975, Aarhus, Denmark). Installed as an interwoven presentation of floor and wall-bound artworks, the exhibition plays host to a series of discrete performative encounters that repurpose the contents of the galleries from one moment to the next. These bodily presences—an actor attempting to cry, a museum receptionist growing their hair and beard, a pregnant woman in a camel hair coat, and others—appear intermittently among an array of sculptural assemblages. Beier’s artistic practice often embraces contradiction, suggesting that the display of sculpture is as much related to modes of staging as it is to museography. The exhibition’s title itself reflects the double nature of Beier’s interests—Casts refers both to a sculptural process and the process by which actors are assigned their roles for a given performance.

The exhibition is an opportunity to roam the duplicitous terrain of Beier’s work of the past two decades. Organized with a scenographic mindset, the exhibition allows the objects on view to inhabit variable identities as sculptures, props, symbols, currencies, or mere consumer goods. The appearance of visual tropes in Beier’s sculptures and performances reveals the changes in meaning inherent to reproduction and accumulation over time. Employing a formal vocabulary of fakes, forgeries, copies, counterfeits, and dupes, Beier’s body of work simultaneously undermines and reinforces standard systems of value and our understanding of the so-called natural world.

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Curated by Aram Moshayedi – Interim Chief Curator, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Curator-in-Residence, Museo Tamayo.

Curatorial Assistant: Ana Sampietro Brosa