Mariana Castillo Deball (born 1975 in Mexico City) is an artist who studied in Mexico City and Maastricht. She is currently based in Berlin. In 2009 she was awarded the Ars Viva prize, which has been presented by the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI (Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy at the Federation of German Industries) every year since 1953, and is awarded to young visual artists who live and work in Germany. Castillo Deball uses installation, sculpture, photography and drawing to explore the role objects play in our understanding of identity and history. Engaging in prolonged periods of research and field work, she takes on the role of the explorer or the archaeologist, compiling found materials in a way that reveals new connections and meanings. In Castillo Deball's 2013 work Stelae Storage, Plaster casts copied from monolithic Mayan stone sculptures called stelae are displayed on metal racks similar to those found in a museum's storage area. In a similar work, Lost Magic Kingdoms Paolozzi (2013), Castillo Deball culled photographic reproductions from the personal archives of late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who mixed pop and ethnographic references. Castillo Deball has been included in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and North America including the 2015 solo exhibition ¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento? at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MACO) in Oaxaca, the 54th Biennale di Venezia, and in dOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany.