Sala10: Natalia del Mar Kašik

Mise en abyme is a narrative or visual technique in which a piece is repeated inside of itself, creating an infinite or self-referential effect, as occurs in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, for example.[1] In this sense, the cleanness and apparent simplicity of Aufsicht [Guard] (2024) alienate the viewer. Through a series of close ups, we observe a guard in what seems to be a white cube. She walks through the space without giving any clues as to what she’s doing there; nevertheless, we come to realize that she’s alone and that there’s no piece to be guarded. The video is disturbing because of the guard’s apparent uselessness: she seems exhausted, overwhelmed, constantly shifting to relieve the weight on her feet. The piece offers us a final twist, revealing itself to be a matryoshka, like One Thousand and One Nights or Don Quixote: the piece she seems to be guarding is a video of her guarding the piece.

Why is it disturbing for us to find Aufsicht within Aufsicht? Just as Don Quixote is a character in Don Quixote and all the characters of Gossip Girl are characters on the eponymous blog and begin to act accordingly, perhaps it’s unsettling for a fictional character or participant in an artwork to simultaneously be a reader or spectator within that work because it makes it possible for us as an audience to be fictional characters or artistic representations in turn.

According to art theorists such as Boris Groys[2] or Carol Duncan, an artwork is something that is exhibited in a museum: everything else is life or something else entirely, but it isn’t art. Twentieth-century artistic practices such as Dada and conceptual art, not to mention Situationism, attempted to expand, question and even overcome some of the underlying assumptions of the art world, particularly the separation between life and art.

In Aufsicht, Natalia del Mar Kašik poetically interrogates the infrastructure that upholds the ought of art. By doing so, she explores art’s conditions of possibility through the framework established by Joseph Kosuth[3]: all artworks are a proposition regarding what art is. So, is art a technical file, an institutional choreography or something else entirely?

M. S. Yániz


[1] Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme, Seuil, París, 1977.
 
[2] Boris Groys, Sobre lo nuevo: ensayo de una economía cultural, Valencia, Pre-textos, 2005.
 
[3] Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings 1966-1990, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1991.

Natalia del Mar Kašik
Aufsicht [Guard], 2024
Digital transfer of color 16 mm film
04’ 59”
Actress: Barbara Ungepflegt
Sound: Allegra Kortlang, Natalia del Mar Kašik, Santiago Krahn
Colorization: Julia Stakhorska
Produced in collaboration with Mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig
Wien) and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Courtesy of the artist

This piece forms part of the winning selection of artworks from the 2025-2026 #Sala10 Call for Submissions.
 

Natalia del Mar Kašik
(Graz, 1997)

Natalia del Mar Kašik grew up in Austria and Spain, in a back-and-forth that shaped her sense of belonging. She has lived in Graz, Vienna, Barcelona, Santiago and Mexico City, exploring her identity through analog film formats such as Super 8 and 16 mm. She studied independent film and artistic photography at the Schule Friedl Kubelka and earned a degree in Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna. She currently explores the identity of the feminine in the media. Her work has been shown at festivals such as the International Filmfestival Rotterdam, Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film and the São Paulo International Film Festival.

Text: M. S. Yániz
Curtorial coordination: M. S. Yániz
Digital management: Ana Cristina Sol Sañudo
Content editing: Roberto Barajas Amieva, Vanessa López García
English translation: Julianna Neuhouser