BERLIN.- Mariechen Danz (* 1980 in Dublin, Ireland) is the recipient of the GASAG Art Prize 2024. The GASAG initiated award, has been presented in cooperation with the Berlinische Galerie since 2010. With the prize the partners honour an outstanding artistic position at the intersection of art, science and technology every two years.
In her artistic practice Mariechen Danz explores methods and models of human knowledge. In installations and performances she combines scientific systems for appropriating and describing the world, with subjective, alternative and magical thinking. The starting point for her artistic research is the human body, which serves as a template for new approaches to communicating or presenting information and knowledge.
For her exhibition “edge out” Danz transformed the entrance hall of the Berlinische Galerie into an expansive installation, in which, like an unfolded map the floor and walls are linked by sculptural interventions. The show builds on an extensive visual language of cartography, geology, technology, anatomy and astronomy forged by the artist over the years in her sculptures, performances and videos. Depictions and casts of organs of the human body for example, are a central motif in Danz’s work. In this exhibition they appear sometimes as negative imprints in bricks, as translucent sculptures, or as a shadowplay on the walls. As futuristic fossils they escape time, charting the influence of politics and society on our bodies.
Recent video works add an acoustic component to the space. The artist‘s voice is accompanied by rhythmic, repetitive or spherical sounds made in collaboration with Gediminas Žygus. Her melodious or spoken singing overlays the imagery, which shows details bathed in shadow from the artist’s sculptures and visual compositions. These mark the shifts between micro- and macro-perspectives in Danz’s works, while the voice and sound allude to oral tradition, individual experience and ritual acts.
The pictorial systems, objects and symbols in “edge out” establish cross-references and constantly form new associations and connections. This creates a complex multiperspective space, that can be explored as both an abstract mental model and a physically tangible perceptual space. Mariechen Danz places the human body and indivi- dual experience at the centre of how we understand the world, revealing knowledge to be a dynamic, somatic and not always explicable process.
Until 14 October 2024, the IBB Video Space at the Berlinische Galerie complements the exhibition in the entrance hall by screening the performances “Knot in Arrow: Ore Oral Orientation” and “Clouded in Veins: a subjective geography”. These performances were both presented at the 57th Biennale di Venezia in 2017.
Mariechen Danz studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam before obtaining her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 16th Istanbul Biennial, the 57th Biennale di Venezia, the High Line in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
