Conceptual artist Maria Loboda uses various media including sculpture, mural painting and objects. She first presented her series of photographs The Ngombo in 2016 at the Maisterravalbuena Gallery in Madrid as part of an exhibition of her work under the title 'Domestic Affairs and Death'. She is interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud and the legacy of psychoanalysis, especially issues concerned with fetishism and individual rituals. The work is an examination of the Freudian moment of death and of a sort of eroticism contained within objects, as the most prosaic icons of modernity. To that end, she approaches contemporary Western individuals using two different genres and formats: man appears as confined, via a number of everyday objects in aluminium suitcases; woman is depicted in The Ngombo by an object which has a strongly intimate meaning and connotations in terms of gender: a handbag.

As if upended in a desperate search for some object inside them, handbags (all of which contain natural elements such as leather or cane) are partly tipped out onto mats made of different materials and meshes that suggest a context other than that in which these accessories are usually found, perhaps the inside of a cabin in some imagined tribal setting. The contents tipped out are also surprising, and reference the two concepts of the exhibition: domestic objects and death. Along with items that one might expect (a pen, a wallet, a bunch of keys, a toothbrush, a make-up mirror, a lipstick and a blister-pack of pills), other, more disturbing objects have fallen out of each handbag: a wing, some bird claws and a number of small bones, hinting strikingly at some sort of magic spell or voodoo that calls for these organic objects as fetishes or votive offerings, kept inside an ordinary bag. The title The Ngombo is taken from a custom of the Chokwe people of central Africa, which translates as 'shaking the divination basket'. This is a reference to a divination system based on objects and represents a guiding spirit or the spectre of an ancestor and protector.

In line with the archaeological and anthropological viewpoint generally taken by Loboda, this combination of consumer products with ritual objects from other cultures seems to hint that there is no difference between them, i.e. that both are used as protection against undifferentiation and as panaceas for dealing with the fear of death, which is ubiquitous but unspoken in today's societies. Pills and dietary supplements approved by modern science appear alongside feathers imbued with the promise of ritual salvation; a lighter lies next to the vertebra of a mammal waiting to be tossed into the air by a shaman; an upturned lady's bag becomes a divination basket that reflects the full context in which the strangeness of ritual violence can be glimpsed among the recognisable, reassuring profiles of domestic objects. With this, Loboda establishes a connection between archaic and contemporary forms of esotericism and superstition, of seeking protection, in which modern individuals tackle intimate, atavistic fears that still remain, even though the owners of these handbags are part of the flow of progress and productivity.

To sum up what she is trying to do, she references the evocative, revealing tale of The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts) by Lord Dunsany (1915), which begins with these words: 'There was a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx.'

Carlos Martín