Marianne Berenhaut

Marianne Berenhaut (b.1934) does not sculpt, she assembles. She gathers found objects from the streets of her native Brussels and, more recently, the charity shops of London, where she has lived since 2015. In her studio she cleans and polishes these items – including high-heeled shoes, broken typewriters, safety gloves, paper bags, old bottle racks and large-scale PVC fabric panels – for many hours, occasionally amplifying their wear and tear with chemical products, before arranging them without glue or any other adhesive.¹ Berenhaut continually reconfigures the various materials before settling on a composition – a system of serendipitous freedom that resonates with Umberto Eco’s notion of the ‘open work’.² The resulting works are propositions, more akin to flotsam and jetsam than sterile, Duchampian readymades or Daniel Spoerri’s archaeological approach to found objects.

Redirections and reinventions have governed Berenhaut’s sixty-year career; the only constant was her occupation as a nurse in local psychiatric hospitals.³ In the 1960s, following an extended stay in Kinshasa, Congo, where she and her husband, the doctor and painter Jacques Simon, helped to build a hospital after the country gained independence, Berenhaut enrolled at the Académie Jacques Moeschal, Brussels. Her first foray into artmaking was in the form of architectural sculptural designs. She began working with heavy materials, such as iron rods, sackcloth and plaster, and created a series of miniature bunker-style buildings, which she titled Maison-Sculptures (1964–69). Like many post-war architects, Berenhaut broke away from the angular designs of modernist architecture, creating sculptures that resembled expanding garment- or umbrella-like structures.

In 1969 a fall through a glass roof left her bedridden for months. Suddenly, she was no longer able to work with the materials that she had previously employed – aligning her practice with that of Hannah Villiger (1951–97) and Rebecca Horn (1944–2024), two women artists of a similar generation who each experienced a creative rupture following an extended stay in hospital. The scope and heft of her materials changed: steel and plaster were replaced by delicate gauze stockings and smaller found objects. Later, when the artist relocated from Brussels to Rebecq, her landlord discarded the works of art stored in her basement, effectively destroying her Maison-Sculptures except for a handful of photographs.⁴

Berenhaut’s work after the Maison-Sculptures can be categorised into four series: Poupées-Poubelles (1970–80), Vie Privée (1981–2000), Cahiers-Collages and Bits and Pieces (2015–ongoing). The Poupées-Poubelles works consist of nylon tights filled with hay, straw, flowers, watches, frying pans and other kitchen utensils. When installed in a gallery, the dolls must be propped up against the wall or seated on a chair to prevent them from falling over. In 2009 Berenhaut exhibited all forty-nine of the Poupées-Poubelles in the Baroque church of Saint-Loup, Namur FIG.1, creating a congregation of unsettling, misshapen protagonists.⁵

The works in Vie Privée FIG.2 are primarily large-scale, site-specific installations and assemblages.⁶ Some use abandoned furniture, such as chairs or bedframes, which she adorns with flowers or moss. For example, Gâteau d’Anniversaire FIG.3 comprises a kitchen table shrouded in a frayed floral tablecloth with a fabric rose attached, and thirty-eight metal cones arranged in a circular formation. Other works from the series rely on the accumulation of individual elements, such as paper bags, shoe maintenance boxes and broken mirrors FIG.4. Following her move to London, Berenhaut began Bits and Pieces. It takes a more playful approach, as evidenced in the garland of paper clips in Just for Fun (2021) and Conversation FIG.5, in which the seats of two wooden chairs overlap, their curved backs resembling arms reaching out towards one another. Alongside her sculptural practice, Berenhaut has developed a distinctive body of work on paper, titled Cahiers-Collages, in which she fills sketchbooks with drawings and collages of everyday items, such as bottle tops, feathers, coins, confetti, pins, needles and straws.

Since 2020 Berenhaut’s work has received renewed interest, especially in Belgium, where two large retrospectives were staged within the space of two years: at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (M HKA) FIG.6, and CIAP Kunstverein, C-mine, Genk FIG.7 FIG.8, which is housed within a former industrial mining site.⁷ The latter, Mine de Rien, curated by Alicja Melzacka, occasioned an imaginative return to the types of spaces that have facilitated Berenhaut’s work over the years, including the Eternit factory in Kapelle-op-den-Bos and the Gare de Watermael, where Berenhaut set up her studio in the disused waiting room in the 1970s. CIAP Kunstverein’s location struck a particular chord with the performative, Land art and conceptual elements and registers of Berenhaut’s practice. Extensive archival material – presented in the gallery and the exhibition catalogue – highlighted the many instances in which Berenhaut has circulated outside the museum or gallery context, whether touring with a theatre troupe, taking part in feminist actions or displaying her work in a public park. Her practice has always remained closely entwined with daily life, perhaps reflecting a desire to restore her objects to the places she found them.

As is the case with many Jewish artists of her generation, Berenhaut’s work – however witty, sensual and intimate may be – is often discussed as forensic evidence of the Shoah.⁸ Curators, critics and broadcasters have been similarly intent on surfacing brutal truths about her precarious childhood, elaborating a hermeneutic of pain and suffering that has come to stand in for her work. This has primarily been enacted in tandem with a vaguely chronological reading of her different series: the haunted houses of Maisons-Sculptures, their inhabitants in Poupées-Poubelles and the abandoned interiors left behind in Vie Privée.⁹ Rebuking this contextualisation, two exhibitions in 2023 activated Berenhaut’s œuvre in a meaningful way: the group show Four Sisters at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, Brussels; and her first solo exhibition in Germany, De Bon Cœur | De Bunker at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen.

Drawing on Claude Lanzmann’s film of the same name (2017), which documents the recollections of four women Holocaust survivors, Four Sisters traced the lives and work of the artist and film-maker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015), the painter Sarah Kaliski (1941–2010), the photographer Julia Pirotte (1907/08–2000) and Berenhaut – four women artists who shared experiences of the Shoah in Brussels. Through a form of imaginative storytelling in which memory communed with fiction, the exhibition charted their lives and their interactions in similar circles, when they occasionally crossed paths or glimpsed one another at an exhibition or screening. Divided into three sections – ‘destruction’, ‘emancipation’ and ‘visibility’ – the exhibition functioned as a sensitive liberation from previous frameworks, allowing for a rereading of their respective practices.

In ‘destruction’, four of Berenhaut’s Poupées-Poubelles were placed in dialogue with three of Pirotte’s portraits FIG.9. Slumping on their chairs and the floor, the dolls’ fragmented and mutilated torsos and limbs appear in stark contrast to the intimate and cheerful black-and-white photographs of Pirotte’s sister, Mindla Maria. A beach photographer for Dimanche Illustré, Pirotte joined the French Resistance movement in Marseille, capturing the precarity and the interned Jewish women and children, but also the city’s uprising, with her first camera, a Leica Elmar. Her photographs now play a significant role in the documentation of the Nazi occupation. In dialogue with Berenhaut’s sculptures, they showcased the duality of the human existence, in which suffering, defiance and hope co-exist. In another section of the exhibition, Berenhaut’s sculptures developed a life of their own, trailing towards freedom. For example, Par Terre (2023), a piece of aluminium bent into the form of a shoreline, seemed to guide the twelve broken typewriters of En Rang FIG.10 towards an unknown destination. Not only did Berenhaut’s inclusion in Four Sisters prove somewhat cathartic for the artist, remedying years of self-censorship in regard to her parents’ death in Auschwitz-Birkenau, it also contextualised her sculptures as sociopolitical documents and examples of women’s conceptual and installation art in twentieth-century Belgian art history.

On the closing day of Four Sisters, Berenhaut’s retrospective opened at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen. In this exhibition, the Director, Nico Anklam, followed an almost antithetical approach to that of the curators of Four Sisters, Barbara Cuglietta and Yann Chateigné Tytelman. Whereas the Jewish Museum offered the necessary environment for Berenhaut’s sculptures to be understood first and foremost in dialogue with the work of her counterparts in the Belgian art scene, the show in Recklinghausen placed her works at the centre of the trauma: a former high-rise bunker from the Second World War. Working with the artist, Anklam composed a site-specific narrative of liberation that spanned the three floors of the Kunsthalle. Following a chronological trajectory that began with photographs of the Maisons-Sculptures FIG.11, the exhibition culminated in the installation A Day Out FIG.12: a weeping fig tree growing out of a large mound of earth, alongside an old street-barrier, which caged a wooden chair. While the exhibition’s denouement alludes to the possibility of overcoming adversity – a reading that resonated with the local audience in Germany – A Day Out marked another significant shift in Berenhaut’s practice.¹⁰ By simulating a familiar street view, the artist has, for the first time, introduced a non-domestic environment into her œuvre, leaving behind the trauma-laden narratives of personal, as opposed to public, place.

And yet, as configurations that contain many possibilities, Berenhaut’s sculptures and installations continue to exist as propositions, inviting not singular readings but multiple at once. As such, they tie into the art historian Alois Riegl’s theory of Stimmung (which literally translates as ‘mood’) as a means to read art. In a recent essay, Kristian Vistrup Madsen applied Stimmung to our understanding of site-sensitive installations, outlining the German word’s evocation of ‘voice, tune, and attunement, as well as atmosphere and resonance’.¹¹ It is true that Berenhaut has often summoned specific moods, even if unpremeditated. Yet, her arrangements have always adjusted to the contexts of their respective setting, whether a park, a mine, a Baroque church or a high-rise bunker. They disrupt the course of daily life, forcing us to reconsider and reconfigure their place – and our own – within these propositions.