Monica Bonvicini: It is Night Outside
Capitain Petzel, Berlin
1 May — 7 June, 2025
Monica Bonvicini’s exhibition It is Night Outside at Capitain Petzel is a commanding and immersive experience that spans all three levels of the gallery. The show features new sculptures, works on paper, and a site-specific video installation, all of which invite viewers to engage with themes of space, identity, and their construction.
An important artwork of the exhibition is the two-channel video installation, also titled It is Night Outside, screened in the lower exhibition space. The immersive sounds of the video resonate throughout the upper galleries, creating a cohesive sensory experience. The video features three performers navigating an undefined environment, repeatedly rearranging the interior. Their unrelenting and restless actions transcend individual gestures and can be interpreted as a broader reflection on societal conditions and acts of resistance.
Among the most viscerally arresting is Divergent Threads (2025), a wall-bound composition of powder-coated steel rods and cinched black leather belts—the kind you’d expect from a men’s department store, not a gallery. Tautly looped and pierced through metal, these belts no longer function as garments or restraints. They read like scars on an architectural body, or perhaps a diagram of constraint and control. It’s a piece that speaks with the tense elegance of bondage gear reimagined as minimalism, turning masculinity’s cold accessories into visual symbols of friction, force, and failed authority.
The exhibition also features a series of works on paper with titles such as Bitch, Vamp (light), and Vamp (pink). These pieces isolate historically derogatory terms used to categorize and demean women, urging viewers to reconsider them through a progressive lens as part of a feminist process of linguistic reclamation.
Overall, It is Night Outside reflects on the tensions of our time, both on an individual and societal level. The exhibition raises questions about self-representation, alienation, and interpretive authority, while drawing attention to the fragility of societal structures—a subject of pressing political urgency.
