A young woman in a long, lace-adorned garment is slowly, deliberately crushing two raw eggs in her hand. In her video performance, What Will Be(2013), Chantal Maquet herself features in her video performance wearing her mother’s wedding dress. As is often the case in the artist’s work, the piece revolves around a critical reflection of female role attributions. The burst eggs allude to the refusal to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood leading to the Golden Cage of economic dependence in accordance with a male-dominated model of matrimony. Maquet has molded this cage in the shape of the wedding dress she is wearing—or in the shape of a headless clothes dummy—out of gold lacquered mesh wire. It is part of a spatial installation that the artist showed in Hamburg in 2014 under the ironic title Les Belles Images (“The Beautiful Pictures”). In addition to the video and the sculpture, this included the wall object Eiloser Zyklus (“Eggless Cycle,” 2013), comprised of empty egg cartons arranged like a sun wheel. A group of paintings depicted women and girls in different constellations and engaged in various activities: secretaries in an office; women with and without children chatting at a summer afternoon gathering; women at work and at leisure. The feminist writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is also present, while standardized houses of a suburban settlement suggest a normed idyll of life: golden cages of another kind.
The source images for the painted scenes largely stem from photo albums of earlier times. The systems of reference in which they are embedded remain relevant. Maquet’s own origins and the paths that others have taken before her and that carry her into the future as a woman and artist are recurring themes in her work. These are also brought to bear in performative, time-based, and installation forms, which partially also include paintings. In the video Der lange Weg (“The Long Way,” 2015), the artist walks through a forest in a red party dress and red pumps, clearing a stone-paved path on the foliage-strewn ground armed with a leaf blower. The representation of family structures, in turn, is the subject of a family tree (verwandt und verschwägert, “related and inlaws,” 2017), which expands as a network of red threads and metal tubes into a widely ramified spatial web: part of Maquet’s exhibition uns verbindet nichts (“Nothing Connects Us,” Dudelange, 2017), which highlighted the complexity of familial bonds on the basis of sibling relationships and conflicts.
In the interplay between still life and moving image, the series of flower portraits Stay Gold (2019) unfolds, constantly changing colors in consistent golden frames: gradations of the color wheel produced with digital technique and LED lights. Still lifes of a different kind, based on the paintings of partially withered, solitary potted plants growing towards the light, form the visual core of the space-sound ensemble SOMA DIS TANZ (“SOMA DIS T/DANCE”). Created by the artist in 2020/21 at the height of the pandemic, it poses the question of closeness and distance, which became the central field of interpersonal tensions and forced distancing during the Covid crisis: statements on the subject resounded acoustically from the off when approaching the paintings. Interactivity is a recurring device used by the artist to incorporate the viewers as participants. This is also the case in the video installation One Dog and Tennisballs (2022), a montage consisting of 69 clips in which Maquet’s dog Diego reacts to the throwing of varying amounts of tennis balls: up to the tipping point at which the game threatens to turn into rigid or combative behavior patterns. The members of the audience were able to determine the speed and succession of the film sequences themselves: a deliberate departure from the corset of linear storytelling and a reference to the fact that each person has the ability to change the course of events—in both small and large ways—through their own actions.
The fact that one cannot escape one’s own history, however, is brought into perspective in the video essay Das Erbe annehmen (“Accepting the Legacy,”2021), assembled from found footage belonging to her grandparents. Here, Maquet once again revisits the colonial legacy of her own family history, casting a focus on the larger history and prevalence of racism, violence, and exclusion in our contemporary western societies. This “heritage” cannot be overcome through repression and omission. Instead, it is essential to take a closer look and to focus on that which has been excluded: This is what the artist repeatedly calls for in her work.
