Kasseler KunstVereinsHeim - Program June - Mariechen Danz
Friday, 22. June 2007, 8 p.m.
Mariechen Danz (D/USA)
"Gospel of Bully"
Performance
The roots of earlier cultures lie in expressing what cannot be said and cannot be explained and in drawing strength from that to understand the world, to survive and secure the community. Mariechen Danz establishes contact with this process when she develops heads, masks, scenarios, topographies and scores in associative drawings, when she constructs ritual tools and props, when she creates painted costumes and tapestries and, eventually, entire rooms. She condenses all these works into stagelike performances of ritual or religious choreographies and chants, as it were. They deal with body awareness and religious illumination, with inner worlds which Mariechen Danz brings to the surface. This keeps her performances ambivalent and prevents them from turning into sect-like church services. Instead they form metaphors for our helplessness in the face of the unspeakable. Mariechen Danz, presently in Los Angeles, has been inspired for her performance in the Kasseler Kunstvereinsheim by the contrast between the contemporary culture of daily life in America and the forms of expression of European art history (for example, manierism, medieval church architecture, Gothic sculpture). Her performances will playfully provide this contrast with a forum of expression.
(with Antje Engelmann, Klaus Ostermann and Walter Weiss, music from Bodi Bill and Mariechen Danz)
Mariechen Danz, geboren 1980 in Dublin, studierte Freie Kunst an der Universität der Künste Berlin und audio-visuelle Medien an der Rietveld Academie Amsterdam und war Meisterschülerin bei Prof. Leiko Ikemura. Zurzeit macht sie ihren Master of Fine Arts für Art & Integrated Media am California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.
Curator: Bernhard Balkenhol
