Project 009

Marc Henry: “If Life Is A Party, Who’s Your Piñata?”
July 9 - August 3, 2025
c/o U-Bahn Station Gesundbrunnen (U8) | Berlin

Organized by VENTANA Project.

 

A punching bag: heavy, scarred, and suspended in a 360-degree vitrine. Once an object of brute utility, Marc Henrys sculptural intervention transforms it onto something else - ambiguous, absorbing, watched. Painted with fragmented imagery and shifting surfaces, the bag becomes a slow spectacle, displayed quietly under fluorescent light as commuters pass by. 

Traditionally built for impact, the punching bag here becomes untouchable-caged behind glass, stripped of function, and re-coded as symbol. It holds traces of violence without enacting it, a stand-in for bodies, systems, frustrations. The punching bag, a vessel for projected aggression and kinetic catharsis, is transformed into a quasi-icon: punched, painted, reframed.

The painted surface evokes both camouflage and advertisement, caught between concealment and display. What was one made to take hits now demands to be looked at.

The installation can be read as an inversion of what Paul Virilio called the panorama in The Vision Machine: an immersive visual field that replaces lived experience with total visibility. Here, the vitrine becomes a miniature panopticon-transparent on all sides, offering no true "back".

The viewer is always positioned outside, peering in, consuming the still object. But the bag refused to fully yield - it doesn't resolve into clarity of narrative. Instead, it hovers in ambiguity, a mute witness to cycles of aggression, spectacle, and control.

“If Life Is A Party, Who’s Your Piñata?” is both confrontation and illusion. It asks what happens when tools of violence are aestheticized, and what remains when action is replaced by observation.