Marina Roy’s exhibition What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window sets up an arena of discursive activity between human, animal, myth, psychoanalysis, literature, and biopolitics. The artworks—two and three dimensional works as well as moving image—cull their inspiration from the grotesque, a stylistic term that comes from the Latin grotto, meaning small cave. The original caves were in fact rooms and corridors of the Domus Aurea, an unfinished palace Nero had started in 64 AD but which was buried after his death and then forgotten over fifteen centuries before they were rediscovered. The walls of the rooms were covered in a decorative interweaving of plant, animal, human and mineral imagery. One of Roy’s approaches is to sift through literature and found imagery to uncover and reconstruct a metaphorical network of unconscious corridors and rooms, hinting at the many ways civilization has reconfigured bios to political ends. The work points to how repressed desire and trauma always find a way back through the window, just as ‘nature’ finds ways of reasserting itself despite human/cultural control.

What’s pushed out the door comes back through the window marks the first exhibition in the Or Gallery’s new Berlin satellite space, Or Gallery Berlin.