ART-PRESENTATION: Nina Beier-Baby

Nina Beier is based in Berlin. Her work unfolds the histories enmeshed with serially produced objects and materials. She is drawn to those that have continually mutated and evolved as a result of transcultural exchange, reflecting on the fluctuating value assigned to them throughout the world at different times in history.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Metro Pictures Archive

Nina Beier in her solo exhibition “Baby” presents a selection of new at Metro Pictures Ballery. Nina Beier’s work offers space to contemplate the many and divergent meanings embedded and projected onto these objects. For example, her sculptural arrangements equally consider the baguette as an essential element of human nourishment, sculpted material, and propagated cultural symbol; they exist between an object, its representation, and our interpretation of it. The eponymously titled series “Baby” comprises large waterbed mattresses suspended from the wall. Filled with pebbles, coins and water, the large membranes tensely bulge and sag, suggesting the water may break through at any moment. In the series Plug, bathroom sinks sit on the floor and hang from the walls of the gallery, stuffed with cigars that have been hand-rolled to fit perfectly and suggestively into their drain pipe openings. Nina Beier works with an array of objects that carry particular social histories, from human hair wigs to mechanical rodeo bulls and cigars to soap. By physically challenging these objects in various ways, she investigates how their value is constructed and communicated and reveals implicit power structures. Beier attempts to loosen up and confuse binary constructs such as masculine/feminine, interior/exterior, organic/artificial, global/domestic. For example, the artist employs real hair wigs grown by women in China and India that have been bleached, permed, dyed, cut, and styled in order to imitate a variety of western hair types. Each wig is framed under glass, shifting its status into that of an image while also emphasising its physicality. Beier uncovers multiple layers of meaning in her objects: what is implied through the intention, use and trading of the objects and perhaps most importantly, what is projected onto them.

Info: Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 26/10-21/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.metropictures.com