Indirect States of Address is a solo exhibition by Cameroonian-born visual artist and performer Marcelline Mandeng Nken.
Mandeng Nken's practice reimagines archetypes of femininity in order to unpack the endurance expected of feminized labor in response to the economic, ecological, and emotional demands of contemporary life. In the multimedia site specific installation Indirect States of Address, she reimagines the theater as an anatomical entity shaped by the audience's projecting desires. At its center is the madwoman, a literary figure and archetype 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 volcanic 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 gestures that defy containment.
