Mariechen Danz
Artists fear the ground-floor hall of the Berlinische Galerie. Receiving the GASAG Art Prize means facing this space: six meters high, narrow, long. With her solo exhibition “edge out,” this year’s winner, Mariechen Danz, owns the room.
At the core of her show lies the mystery of the human body, which Danz explores through installation, sculpture, and performance. Her voice in the video Ore Oral Orientation: Clouded in Veins, 2018/2024, fills the room. Part song, part speech, Danz’s voice rhythmically strings together words like “earth, skin, tissue, rock,” their simplicity both belying and amplifying the exhibition’s complex central questions. Raised in Ireland, where oral traditions have long shaped knowledge transmission, Danz uses singing to ask: How objective is our understanding of the body? And how can the divide between mental and corporeal ways of knowing be reconciled?
Envisioning the space as a map, Danz uses the exhibition to chart the human body and reimagine epistemic systems. Cast footprints from her “Possible Paths (soil sample)” series, 2014/2024, run along the walls, soles visible from below, as if someone had walked the room’s perimeter. Formed from materials referencing geological depths, such as soil or coal, these footprints evoke possible pathways through space and time. And they remind us that maps—like bodies—shaping our view of the world, are conceived with arbitrarily defined, fallible systems.
The aluminum sculptures comprised in Common Carrier Case (X Votive/starmaps), 2024, mounted on the walls, resemble human figures. Punctuated with valves, sockets, and connectors, they evoke mechanical functions and seem to ask: If our knowledge of the body is tied to ever-evolving technology, what about it is truly objective?
These aluminum sculptures cast meter-long shadows—some painted, others “real.” Only when we move around do we see the painted shadows stay put. Echoing Plato’s cave, Danz reminds us that the only certainty we have is that we might have gotten it all wrong.
