The Salon by NADA and The Community

‘Cold Storage’ Series (2024)

Monika Grabuschnigg’s ‘Cold Storage’ series explores how the more ephemeral areas of our private lives are preserved. As a kind of household archive, refrigerators not only serve to slow the decay of food, medicine or chemicals, they also provide a snapshot of their users through the items stored within them – or absent from them. In an extension of this role of preserving everyday consumables, the clay-cast insides of refrigerator doors and shelves become vehicles for an introspective examination of the individual. The glazed forms are adorned with relics of fleeting life—decals from the artist’s photo archive alongside cast objects like blister packages and eye drop vials—representing traces of absence and impermanence. Simultaneously, these elements testify to consumption and (mis)use as both “harmful” and pleasurable indulgences of the body, offering a counter-narrative to the promise of pristine preservation. As often with her practice, Grabuschnigg’s intensely material pieces radiate an ambient melancholy, a nagging and deeply physical ache.