2021, ash wood, 450 x 188 cm, Max Ernst Museum, Brühl

Sophie Stadler

An almost five-metre deco lettering on the wall quotes Karl Marx from a local newspaper in 1842. With the newly introduced wood theft laws at that time, the collection of firewood - and thus actually a state of dispossession - was criminalised. This is just one of the loops that Belia Brückner manages to depict or reveal in Deko-Schriftzug Artikelnummer: 3116415002. Wood is also made into paper. You know those people with papers confirming what is their property, or employment contracts, or begging letters, or advertisements. The loop, known to be the form of the paranoid, which is contagious and unfortunately also all too symmetrical, is demonstrated here in the relationship between need and freedom. Brückner's artistic works have always dealt with prisons and juvenile detention centres: with the randomness of the severity of punishment, which so often depends on where one lives, the difficulty of maintaining contacts and relationships, the mind-numbing emptiness of the libraries, which can only be called a frightening annihilation of perspective. Deko-Schriftzug Artikelnummer: 3116415002 refers to a product of the platform Knastladen.de: Decorations made by prisoners for those homes they themselves are so far away from.

In order not to make use of this 'service', Brückner milled the letters herself. Mandatory labor as a method of education in the course of 'resocialisation' - inside as well as outside - is driven by the idea that otherwise laziness would set in. On closer inspection, however, laziness turns out to be more and more of an 'inaccessible vice' for the propertyless class. Because even at the very edge of society it can still be made useful. Thus, one could also assume in the unwieldy title of the work a reference to exhaustion, to loops of exploitation in order to "earn something", be it a (financial-) reward, attention or punishment. It raises the question of what can be argued with certainty when so much of life is tied to economic laws rather than relationships with our fellow human beings. Failure in this system proves nothing. Wood is made into fire.