Marcelline Mandeng Nken: Indirect States of Address

Marcelline Mandeng Nken: Indirect States of Address

04.10.2025 – 15.11.2025

Indirect States of Address reimagines the theater as an anatomical entity, an ecosystem shaped by the power of spectatorship to alter what it beholds. At its center is the madwoman, a literary figure whose unruly mind and expanding fury become a site of protest against psychological and social duress. Throughout the exhibition, her phantom voice and nomadic presence serve as a vehicle to address strategies of concealment and disclosure, unsettling the architectured illusions of spectacle. 

Through a series of hybrid sculptural arrangements, theatrical fixtures that usually recede into the background are recast as static performers imbued with agency. Rigging, curtains, and seating—relics of countless encounters—are tethered to organic materials like resin bones, stingray skin, and tar. In a state of suspension, these forms expose the psychic labor of witnessing and the fetishism that binds an audience to performance. Across the gallery’s two rooms, the works trace the madwoman’s episodic transgressions of respectable femininity, revising manuals of domesticity and place-making. In their liminal display, they signal a refusal of containment, where rootlessness emerges as a diasporic practice of survival and transformation.