What is my work about?
My work is focused on confrontation as a form of media. The most effective confrontational form is one’s body. The body, mine or other’s, is the basis from which all my works derive and the center of my work’s conceptual process. To a woman, the body is an aesthetic instrument whose concealment fails to differ from its exposure?which is to say, we are often naked even with our clothes on. This contradiction prepares the body as a site for confrontation, a place from which I respond to the feminist call to “Take Space.”
Artist Statement
I started making art, especially performances and videos, as a reaction against prescribed forms of social existence. This reaction came most importantly from being identified as woman, as a sexualized other, which formed the basis of my performance, “A Woman for Sale,” a work in which I transform myself into product through cultural assumptions of femininity. Recently, I’ve been exploring other artistic strategies, namely installation, in order to provoke more atmospheric forms of confrontation, a coping tactic to deal with the cultural wound that performance is nowadays. This began with my project “Infested”, a collaborative group performance that situated a number players parasitically within a social setting. On top of the performance, I rubberized the room, so to speak. The walls and the furniture were covered with sheets of clinical and industrial rubber as a way of affectively charging the environment to the tune of a prophylactic. My interest in the signification of this material continued in a follow-up project, “Your Lips are So Soft,” a more conventionally object-oriented exhibition that saw these rubbers, like my femininity in “A Woman for Sale,” turned into product. Among these objects works were several that included drawings, a practice that I have been exploring consistently for past several years. While not explicitly connected to topics addressed by my larger projects, they nevertheless reflect a continuous process of imaginative thought that informs my practice in general, largely aiding me in exploring the communicative range of this practice’s somewhat conventional gestures, primarily finding ways of rendering artistic marks in the interest of performative attitudes.
More recently, I have produced the work “Sorry, Not Sorry” which furthers my interest in coupling performative confrontation with atmospheric deçor. In these works I convert my sexualized body into an atomized image that serves an industrially produced window screen, symbolic deçor that interpellatively filters outside and in. These functionality of these performative images is further extended in their iteration as design material for wearable scarves. These works repurpose the generic use of the female body as a photographic object so as to construct a situation in which my body engenders a play of concealment particular to this typically feminine accessory, a play of revealing and concealing its wearer’s skin with that of another’s.
Generating situations that enable one to confront the conventionalized methods of distributing space, particularly along lines of sexual differentiation, has served as the conceptual core of my recent work. Alongside the works described above, which can all be seen as a response to the feminist call to “Take Space,” I also respond to this injunction with a number of collaborative projects—be it in the form of a guerrilla art exhibition with M/L Artspace, role reversal within art-gallerist relations with my on-going collaborations with Jeanne Graff or, even in the simplest way, works on paper that parasite the host centers of contemporary group exhibitions.
CV
Collaborate Projects
2013 – present M/L Artspace, NY, NY.
2013 – present “Jeanne and Marie” on various locations
2012 – 2013 Xtapussy, NY, NY
2012 – 2013 1:1, NY, NY
2011 – present Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY, NY
2008 – 2010 Dead Muse, Paris, France
Solo Exhibitions
2013
Your Lips Are So Soft, Sandy Brown, Berlin, Germany
A Woman for Sale, 1:1, NY, NY
Group Exhibitions
2014
It Gets Better, Artists Space, NY, NY
Mario and John, Kraftstrasse 1, Basel, Switzerland
WARM MATH, Balice Hertling, NY, NY
Release of Capricious No.15, Capricious Gallery, NY, NY
Psycho Futurism, Scandinavian Institute, NY, NY
Under the Oak Tree, M/L Artspace, Paramount Ranch Art Fair, LA
The Eight White Columns Annual curated by Pati Hertling, White Columns, NY, NY
2013
Nail Us, M/L Artspace, Brooklyn, NY
Marie & Jeanne, Graff Morgue D’Algue, Geneva, Switzerland
9 Artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (Exhibition traveled to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014)
Beware of the Holy Whore, Artist Space, NY, NY
Freak Out, Greene Naftali Gallery, NY, NY
Paris and Wizard, Musical by Ei Arakawa, MoMa, NY, NY
Savoir Murir, Sandy Brown, Berlin, Germany
All the best People, Group exhibition, 1:1, NY, NY
2012
Throw Up, Canal 47, NY, NY
2011
Yoga Slave, Gallery Bohman, Stockholm, Sweden
Yoga Slave, Royal Academy of Art, Performance, Stockholm, Sweden
2010
DEAD MUSE, Gallery Bastard, Stockholm, Sweden
2009
Video Rapes, Andrea Crews, Paris, France
Bibliography
Thor Shannon, “The Real World: Marie Karlberg” Out Of Order, 2014
Michael Musto, “Marie Karlberg” Art in America, 2014
Desi Santiago “Selling Marie” Document Journal, Summer 2013
Michelle Kuo “1000 Words: Antonio Blair, Marie Karlberg and Stewart Uoo” Artforum, Summer 2013
Caroline Busta “All the best People” 1:1 Artforum, March 2013
Alexis Swerdloff “Because the Wildest Nouveau Rave in Town Is Thrown By a Jubilant, Militant Feminist” New York Magazine, December 2012
Residences
TwoHOTEL, Piracanga Beach, Bahia, Brazil
Slapped, 2014, Video, 2 minutes 20 seconds, looped
Infested, 2013, Performance documentation of collaboration with Leigha Mason, also featuring Nic Guagnini, Keith Connelly and Emil Bognar-Nasdor