Mariana Castillo Deball: Between making and knowing something

Through a collage-like installation featuring pottery, photography and textiles, Mexican-born artist Mariana Castillo Deball works to uncover stories and individuals often hidden in traditional museum displays.

Mariana Castillo Deball’s exhibition focuses on sharing the stories of a number of little-known female anthropologists and indigenous storytellers and makers. To do this, the artist recreates historical artefacts and reconfigures display cases to expose how museum collections both conceal and reveal historical narratives and shape our understanding of the world.

Between making and knowing something is born out of Deball’s ongoing research into museums, the observational science of people and cultures (or ethnography), archaeology and photographic archives. The exhibition particularly explores objects and archives held in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Smithsonian Museum National Collections in Washington D.C.