Curtains are, when you think about it, a strange kind of in-between. They are not architecture in the strict sense: they do not bear loads, they offer only limited protection, and they demarcate space only temporarily and, in a way, provisionally—entirely subject to the whims of their users. They conceal and reveal, and in doing so activate the prescribed, built space, filling it with movement and thus with temporality. A curtain creates a situation, which Duden defines as “the conditions or circumstances in which someone finds themselves at a given moment; someone’s immediate state.” A situation, then, is a very specific interlocking of space and time, a spatially and temporally delimited arrangement characterized by a particular atmosphere, by particular tensions, and by particular possibilities of movement. And it is situations that Marianne [Mueller]’s works are always really about. As a photographer, she seeks out situations and captures them in images; as an installation artist, she creates them herself. For this reason, the step from the image into space appears in her work as an organic development that was always already inherent in it. […] [Even as a visitor, one must take the step into space, one must move within Marianne’s installations] in order to grasp them, for they do not reveal themselves to a frontal gaze. The situations she creates can only be understood by moving through them, by being fully, physically present within them.

Martin Jaeggi (excerpt from the laudatory speech on the occasion of the awarding of the Telos Art Award at Kunsthalle 8000, 2024)