Monica Bonvicini at Capitain Petzel: It is Night Outside
There’s a moment, just as you cross the gallery’s threshold, when the darkness implied by the title slips in, not as a lack of light, but as an existential condition. “It is Night Outside”: a phrase that doesn’t merely describe but warns. What is this night? A historical moment? A mental state? A place with no refuge? Monica Bonvicini welcomes us into this uneasy twilight with a precise gesture: she invites us not to seek comfort, but to inhabit instability. As if whispering: “Look at how we build ourselves, and what builds us.”
On view from May 1 to June 7, 2025, at Capitain Petzel in Berlin, and presented as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, It is Night Outside marks Bonvicini’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Spanning three levels, the show immediately registers a palpable tension between control and rupture. Human bodies are absent, yet their presence reverberates throughout. From the lower-floor video installation, its immersive sound rising like a held breath, to the sculptural forms anchoring the main gallery, everything speaks of presence. Performed, material, symbolic. The sound acts as an emotional seismograph, marking the fault lines between works, intensifying the undercurrent of unease.
The video piece It is Night Outside, a two-channel installation set in an indeterminate environment, serves as both the core and the detonator of the show. The performers, locked in compulsive gestures, constantly rearrange an interior space. There is no narrative, only repetition. Their persistence becomes political, a stubborn act against stillness. Body, gender, and social space become terrains of struggle.
Ascending to the main gallery, one encounters monolithic sculptures, metal frameworks wrapped in interlaced leather belts, that resemble both instruments of restraint and post-industrial relics. The leather, a symbol of discipline and dominance, doesn’t hide the underlying structure; it reveals it. The gleaming metal beneath suggests strength, but also fragility, a metaphor for the brittle condition of contemporary society. Power is exposed as a construct that begs to be dismantled.
Nearby, a trio of works on paper, Bitch, Vamp (light), and Vamp (pink), resonate with quiet force. These words, historically used to classify and demean women, are isolated and reframed. Bonvicini transforms them into acts of feminist reclamation. Language, here, is a battleground, and naming becomes a form of resistance.
The final blow comes with a delicate group of sculptures: glass replicas of traditional English coat and hat hooks, bearing not outerwear but women’s underwear. What might first appear quaint or decorative reveals itself as radical. The act of undressing is no longer about exposure, but empowerment, a private ritual reclaimed. Bonvicini interrogates how intimacy is performed, staged, and preserved, navigating the tense boundary between voyeurism and autonomy.
As you exit, a faint metallic rustle lingers, like the sound of a belt being slowly unbuckled. And with it, the realization that the night outside may be nothing more than the projection of the one within. Bonvicini doesn’t offer refuge, but tools, rough, sharp, necessary, with which to build anew. For those willing to enter, perhaps the real work begins in dismantling.
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