View From Above - Mariechen Danz
Speaking to Ancestors 6/7
12. 11 to 20. 11. 2023
Kleiner Wasserspeicher

The Irish-German artist Mariechen Danz(*1980) places the human body at the center of her practice. In sculptures, drawings, costumes and installations - often in collaboration with other artists or musicians - she explores the history(s) of media as data carriers, and questions the communicative capacity of language, common practices of mediating knowledge, hierarchies of signs and the primacy of Western notions of reason. Danz additionally activates her installations with staged vocal performances.

In View From Above (a song from her sound album Clouded in Veins) at the Kleiner Wasserspeicher, Danz directs the gaze from the earth to the sky and vice versa. In her ongoing series of metal glyph structures (in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co.), punched-out, coded and printed aluminium plates are installed in various ar-rangements to convey knowledge and information across the boundaries of time and space. Patterns of vents meet punctuation marks and icons from digital communication; stylised planispheres meet anatomical representations from different cultures and eras. Like modular carriers of knowledge, they become a new vocabulary and serve in the exhi-bition as shadow-casting patterns and reflective media for light that create their own starmaps.

The installation is surrounded by casts of human organs: brain, heart, liver, lung, kidney and intesti-ne. Her series Fossilizing Organs consists of trans-parent and coloured organ models that are offset with stones and minerals. History, politics, culture and socialisation have literally left their mark on these organs. The natural „implants“ set off immanent fossilisation processes in the sculptures and connect the origin of each organ to different places in the world.

In View From Above, Danz assembles a kind of three-dimensional fragmented atlas, that appears in the exhibition space like an operating theater in which subjective and objective, subaltern and historical knowledge is actively treated. Her works Modular Glyphic System and Ore Oral Orientation: modular mapping system, on view in the exhibition, were each created in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co. who develop decolonising strategies for production processes in Silicon Valley.

The exhibition View From Above by Mariechen Danz takes place as part of the exhibition series Speaking to Ancestors curated by Pauline Doutreluingne and Keumhwa Kim. The two-year exhibition series brings together seven artistic positions that deal with the search for genealogies, origins and ritual (image) practices. The invited artists have in common that they develop their own narration about their ancestors, starting from ceremonial, ritual traditions or based on intimate, familial stories. They create a new symbolic and social field of action situated between faded myths and handed-down imagination. They strive to heal societal wounds, resurrect forgotten histories of marginalized groups, and counter patriarchal, colonial power structures through ancestral and magical ritual powers. Speaking to Ancestors explores how our global society responds to ancestor worship, shamanism, animism and myth.


Co-curated with Pauline Doutreluingne
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