Mariechen Danz

Clouded in Veins
Exhibition of the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen 2021

Kunsthalle Recklinghausen
May 2 - August 29, 2021

The exhibition is open from Mai 21, 2021

In 2021, the Ruhrfestspiele art exhibition looks back on a history of more than seventy years and invites Mariechen Danz, the youngest visual artist to date, to take part in the festival exhibition. 
Danz's work takes the (im)possibilities of communication and knowledge transfer as its starting point and places the human body at the centre of her process-based practice. With her sculptures, drawings, costumes and performances, she examines the expressive possibilities and limitations of language, the legibility of signs and their hierarchical systems. Her artistic discourse repeatedly revolves around the subjectivity of all human understanding and replaces one-dimensional explanatory models with empathy and curiosity.
With decolonial approaches, Mariechen Danz shakes up Eurocentric images of history and values and confuses the pigeonholes that we use to organise and dominate the world. In this way, fixed boundaries evaporate and give way to a permanent, never-ending learning process. For the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Mariechen Danz designs spaces in which she stages her works and simultaneously transforms and opens up the architecture of the building. Danz's incitement to communication and dialogue seems more timely than ever in view of the current resurgence of populist power strategies and the threat of social empathy disappearing.

Mariechen Danz was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1980. She studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, and the California Institute of the Arts. Her works have been shown at the Venice and Istanbul Biennials, the Haus der Kunst, Munich, the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the New Museum, New York, among others. Today Mariechen Danz lives and works in Berlin.

We would like to thank the following organisations for their generous support:
Kunststiftung NRW, RAG Stiftung, Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Recklinghausen

The exhibition ‘Mariechen Danz - Clouded in Veins’ is part of the ‘Ruhr Ding : Klima’ programme of the Urbanen Künste Ruhr.