Maria Loboda: Havoc in the Heavenly Kingdom

Maria Loboda has made a specialty of digging into obscure histories—and inventing them too. The Polish artist’s installations sit at the intersection of intrigue, fiction, the esoteric, and archaeological research, nearly always departing from a seemingly overlooked detail that she renders central, fantastical, and always unforgettable.

Pay attention to her titles. There is subterfuge in Maria Loboda’s use of language and in her deployment of stories at once obscure, magical, or strange in the making of her art. Their historical exactitude is largely irrelevant; what matters is that they circulate and in so doing tell us something about our desires, fears, pasts, and potential futures. As a student, the artist’s first public presentation was an assembly of rather ordinary items, including white wood, verbena, fine steel, goatskin, and green ribbons. But its title, The Evocation of Lucifuge Rofocale (2004), meant that visitors who read it inadvertently found themselves calling forth the dark lord in a room full of all the items from the classic demonological recipe to summon him. The project revealed the artist’s persistent fascination with how mere things can be bestowed with a mysterious and auratic force.