This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2024 special issue of Monopol Magazine.
The steel studio door is as buttercup yellow as an old Berlin subway carriage. The elevator isn’t working and the studio nameplates in the stairwell are hand painted. Mariechen Danz’s studio in the Berlin district of Wedding is the very essence of Old Berlin before gentrification. The artist was born in Ireland and has lived in Berlin for over two decades. She works in these light-filled rooms, which, at first glance, look like an organ dealer’s workshop.
The shelves hold human hearts, kidneys, auricles, and pancreases cast in synthetic resin, glass, or other materials and embedded with objects, all ready to be picked up and examined. Such works will be on display in Danz’s solo exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, to mark her being awarded the Gasag Art Prize. This biannual prize is a cooperation between the energy company and the Berlin state gallery and recognizes a promising young artist working at the intersection of art, science, and technology.
This describes Danz very well. Her work brings together internal organs and the cosmos, geology and anatomy, industrial and natural materials. The human voice is at the center of the performances Danz stages in her exhibitions. As well as singing and speaking, she plays with repetitions and variations to create, preserve, and share knowledge. Geographical maps are also intended to share information, yet for centuries, they have been riddled with gaps and errors. In conversation, the artist remarks on how odd it is that we are wholly unable to survive without our organs, yet we know so little about how they look and where they are to be found in our bodies. In contrast to bones and teeth, the liver and heart are not preserved after death, not even when a body is mummified. This is why the history of anatomy is full of inherited misconceptions.
An obsolete division
Danz is fascinated by how knowledge is created and how it is intertwined with power. For her, organs are also metaphors for processes of learning. Her cast works are made using moulds manufactured for medical training. Our kidneys also engage in thought: any division between a noble mind and an unthinking rest is medically obsolete and any hierarchies of thought are false. The table holds soles of feet that have been cast or shaped using sand, clay, asphalt, concrete, wood shavings, and soil, all acting as traces of human contact with the environment.
250 of these foot soles will walk across the walls of Berlinische Galerie, creating what is to be understood as a map. Incidentally, ›Mariechen Danz‹ isn’t an artist pseudonym. Danz was born in Dublin in 1980 to a German father and an Irish mother, and her father named her after his aunt’s nickname. Danz studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and the California Institute of the Arts.
In 2017, she created her own room for the Dionysian Pavilion in the main exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale. Two years later at the Istanbul Biennial, Danz produced thousands of clay bricks embossed with the shapes of human organs, referencing the Ottoman architecture of the Haliç shipyard; this marked the start of a new group of works. The venue, a complex from the 15th century, was built over without notice shortly before the opening, meaning that weeks of work were lost, but the idea remained.
Not every sign has a meaning
Her Berlin show features a desk made using 2,000 such ›body bricks.‹ This item of furniture is inspired by African American fashion designer Willi Smith (1948—1987), who commissioned the design collective SITE to make a desk for his office in the 1980s using bricks, although one of the corners was left unbuilt. An imposing desk as a crumbling organ of power is in line with the critical spirit of her art. Cast organs are mounted on it using thin metal rods, speared like pin markers on an online map.
Indeed, the entire show resembles a map, one which has been folded up at the sides, representing Danz’s response to the specific architectural demands of the museum building. Indeed, the hall where the GASAG prize exhibition is shown is a challenge for all artists, measuring as it does forty-two meters with a narrow width of only eight meters and a ceiling height of ten meters. Danz will create an immersive environment using video and playing with light and shadow, demarcating a hall that is visible from the first floor.
The opening will include an acrobatic performance and the walls will sport hinged objects made from sheet aluminium. Their manufacturer creates the cut-outs in the panels following the customer’s specifications: Danz turns this industrial product into minimalist, anthropomorphic panels full of enigmatic information that dare us to try and interpret them. But the joke is that not every sign has to have a meaning. Danz’s Berlin exhibition offers a kind of walk-in substitute alphabet that subverts our usual linguistic rules and reveals new paths—ones that run across walls and ceilings.
›Mariechen Danz. edge out‹ Berlinische Galerie, 13 September 2024 until 31 March 2025