Ella C Bernard is a German artist whose visual practice encompasses sculpture, installation, moving image, and text. She primarily works with found and salvaged objects and materials, which often bear traces of their use and their abandonment from the utilitarian and capitalist circuit. Selected for their aesthetic and material potential, these elements are incorporated into installations or become sculptures while retaining their agency: they are presented to be read as they are, without calling for metaphorical or narrative interpretations from viewers.

 

Bernard is also interested in underground cable and piping systems, which reveal something about the invisible forces and artificial structures that keep our urban societies running. These systems serve as a metaphor to investigate what remains hidden in plain sight: covert architectures that shape mass and crowd movement. For similar reasons, since 2016 the artist has also explored themes such as the cult of personality, adoration, and fandom, engaging critically with a wide range of figures including David Guetta, Angelina Jolie, Hitler, and (in the making) the band Rammstein. She also pays close attention to small acts of domestic patchwork and repair—gestures that a careful eye can spot in large and medium-sized cities.

 

The artist sees in these acts attempts to engage with the city and to reclaim public space through simple, if fragile, gestures. In turn, the city records the memory of its inhabitants’ actions—human beings and materials meeting through a mutual acknowledgment of their respective characteristics and powers. Bernard describes her sculptural practice as a conversation, a dance, sometimes a wrestle with the material, and says that most of her sculptural work does not operate primarily on the visual level, but rather as an attempt to approach a bodily sentiment or sensation—for instance, the struggle of holding a pile of sports balls together with a ratchet strap.

 

Her videos and installations are informed by this sculptural practice. She describes her video installations as essays on specific or distinct topics—for example, the violence of the gaze in the project Birdwatchers. Her sculptural work informs these more essayistic pieces, and what she learns from her immediate exchanges with materials and objects feeds directly into how she conceives space in her installations.