From time to time we will bring you content from our partnering websites. This week we decided to ramp up some of that cross coverage and bring your interviews and articles from the Huffington Post, Beautiful / Decay and Art Practical. Today we are bringing you a recent article from our friends over at DaWire.com. This coverage of Jan Mancuska’s current exhibition Everything that really is, but has been forgotten at Meyer Riegger in Berlin was written by Christina Irrang and translated by Zoe Miller.

Jan Mancuska’s films, installations and stage performances are based on the reception and conception of space. The artist uses linguistic and figurative means to implement a reconfiguration of space, often connected to a fragmentary, dramaturgical, sometimes surreal or existentialistic narrative. A predominant theme in his choreographic concepts is movement; in visual, semantic, architectural and corporeal forms of expression it is articulated – and then dissolved. For his present show in Meyer Riegger gallery the artist created three new pieces, which shift between graphic art, text piece, sculpture, installation and film. Reconstruction, association and disassociation are perceptive techniques that connect and correlate the individual pieces.

In his installation Notion in Progress, Jan Mancuska outlines a description of space. The focal points of the work are the three words Cine, Mato and Graphy which the artist positioned in the room in various media and materials – a free-standing wooden sculpture, a wall projection and a floor graphic. Similar to a mind map, individual associative words branch out from this primary word structure, developing like a chain of terms – in this case physically along wires that span the room diagonally. The installation oscillates between the visibility and the immateriality of thoughts, which condense into fictive, cinematic sequences within the process of contemplating and reading.

The 16 mm film Postcatastrophic Story is presented on three projectors and causes the disassociation of a chronological order to become a constitutive part of the film image as well as the film narrative: The plot revolves around a news report shown from the viewpoint and basically from the memory of five protagonists. The subject is an insignificant catastrophe that occurred in an unspecified town, which one of the protagonists noticed in a newspaper. In the course of the film, which shows each scene looped in delay, the characters as well as the plot threads belonging to the individuals engage in a dialogue with one another.

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Resistance, 2006; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial scales and swaddles participants—whether knowingly or not—inside the folds of each performance. In the manner of a social scientist, he is wont to stage “temporary situations and imaginative sitespecific constructions that predict various communication patterns in behavior and in the perception of things.” (source) In his 2009 presentation of Measuring the Universe (2007) at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ondák urged museum visitors to mark their height and first name on a white wall—the same way a child might over the years in a hallway at home—until the thousands of black ink markings became as visually dense as they were socially significant.

In Loop, his installation for the Slovakian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he brought the lush grounds of the Giardini Publici into the interior pavilion, causing guests to take pause before realizing that the artist’s installation was in fact the well-ordered plant-life which surrounded them. His 2006 video Resistance, originally staged during an opening at Viennese Museum of Modern Art, plays with ideas of social status by following the feet of a group of guests with untied shoelaces. As reported by Kontakt, the Art Collection of Erste Group (whose artists were being presented in the exhibition during which Resistance was staged), “Fellow visitors were puzzled by this intervention, since there was no direct clue as to why certain people were posing this way. Thus Ondák queries the bondage, not necessarily visible, of certain peer groups, in this case through the need of people working in the field of art to proclaim otherness as a means counterbalancing social standardization.” (source)

Loop, 2009; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

Roman Ondák was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia and now lives in Bratislava. He was recently included in I’m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs at De Appel, Amsterdam—a “solo exhibition that takes the form of a group exhibition in which works by the contributing artists evoke the atmosphere of the work of an absent Francis Alÿs.” He has been included in numerous solo presentations internationally, including at MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; 2009 Venice Biennale; and 2008 Shanghai Biennale.

Yep. You got it. In a brand new series, DailyServing.com will pick two lucky artists every month who submit their work to us for a feature on the website! You could be next! Send us your link to info@dailyserving.com with the subject FAN MAIL. And don’t forget to check back, because you never know – you could be the next artist to grace this spot on our publication!

Andreas Templin’s multi-dimensional body of work includes sculpture, video, installation, photography, and urban interventions. His diverse practice is guided by a critical approach to the making of art; each work is the outcome of an insightful process that examines culture from a philosophical point of view. As the artist states, “The adult individual consumer is faced with the creative possibility of reinventing his identity each day, with the wide variety of enhancement products now available for use. The artist, too, must move with the times, and avoid being a fixed label, but use everything available to him.”

Templin’s technically simplistic, and somewhat disconcerting, video work, As if to nothing (9:54), consists of the constant display of earth’s qualitative statistical data, culled from governmental sources, accompanied by a recording of Anton Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. The emotional depth of the audio heightens the impact and immediacy of the dreary data display. Selected statistics include a tally of the world’s population, military expenditures, infectious diseases, and species extinct. The environmental data set “Ocean Oil Spills (tons)” holds particular poignancy in our current cultural moment.

This type of cultural insight, and perhaps critique, appears in Templin’s vinyl record album, Andreas Templin plays Bach, a recording of the artist whistling Bach throughout the city streets. This more playful form of artistic commentary was born out of the artist’s distaste with the “clean and highly competitive virtuoso-recordings” that exist of the German composer, and was recorded in the red light district of Amsterdam. The album cover was created by classical music photographer Felix Broede.

Templin, who lives and works in Berlin, is currently participating in the group show Consume at Exit Art in New York. The exhibition, which is a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), investigates world food production, consummation, distribution, and waste. Consume will remain on view until August 28th.

In February 2010, Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu was named the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year.” Her accompanying exhibition, My Dirty Little Heaven will open later this month at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin. Recently, DailyServing’s Aimée Reed had a chance to catch up with Mutu at her studio in Brooklyn to discuss her upcoming show, as well as the con-current exhibition This You Call Civilization?, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Wangechi Mutu, "Royal Blue Arachnid Curse", (view of piece installed with damaged wall), 2005, ink, collage, contact paper on Mylar, 77 1/2 x 51 1/2 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Photo credit: Joshua White. Collection of Henry Kravis, New York

Aimée Reed: Tell me about the two exhibitions. Will both shows at AGO (open until May 23^rd, 2010) and Deutsche Guggenheim (April 30^th – June 13^th, 2010) feature works from the same series simultaneously?

Wangechi Mutu: No. They both come from quite a wide range of different works. AGO happened to have contacted me to work with them earlier than the Berlin folks. For example they have installation works such as The Ark Collection (a work that consists of four large vitrines displaying postcard-sized imagery of women from African Art) and Sleeping Heads (drawings of severed heads that are installed on a “damaged wall”, or a wall containing perforated holes that evoke wounds), which are both memorable and significant pieces. They also have a lot of my larger collages, the catalog Shady Promise (published by Damiani) and video works.

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Katharina Grosse’s solo exhibition, Hello Little Butterfly, I Love You What’s Your Name, is occurring until November 7th at ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, in Ishøj, Denmark, within breath of Copenhagen.

Grosse makes canvas of architecture, erecting varicolored walk-abouts by using hundreds of litres of spray paint; mounds of earth; mammoth, leaning discs; and other big, wadded-up shapes. Viewers are not allowed any of the usual aloofness in their relationship to the artwork, as they literally walk through an airbrushed terrain. That status quo is dissolved. At once dreamy and seemingly protean, the space still renders you surefooted but takes your wit from you, bringing you into an unfettered realm. Appropriately, all of her installations are a one-time deal—they are site-specific and short-lived, as if reveries.

Born 1961 in Freiburg, Germany, Katharina Grosse is a graduate of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she studied with Gotthard Graubner and Gerhard Richter. She now lives and works in Berlin. Her last group exhibition was at the Miami Art Museum, Miami Space as Medium (2009); and her most recent solo exhibition, prior to the Arken, was Shadowbox at Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin.

I have to admit, there is nothing more impressive to me than a well executed painting, and spending some time with the work of Johannes Kahrs has done nothing but revive this fascination. Living somewhere between film, modern news media and history painting, Kahrs’ work seamlessly merges the beauty and tradition of painting and portraiture with banal yet grotesque objectivity, seducing the viewer into a reductive, saturated palate only to confront them with an aggressive yet all too familiar imagery. Choosing images generally experienced through second hand sources of information, Kahrs infuses his paintings and drawings with the drama of film, creating a sense of constant motion and closeness within a still and fragmented plane. Claiming imagery typically referenced through our daily interaction with media sources, Kahrs builds on the diversity of photographic images infused with the seductive palette of artists such as Richter and Tuymans, but invests them with a grotesque, bodily relationship to the viewer seen in the work of Jenny Saville. Kahr’s dark and alluring palette creates an ominous sensation surrounding his shrouded, anonymous figures that instantly builds a narrative within his intentionally extracted context. Kahrs’ film-like color references the emotive palette seen in work such as Luc Tuymans’ Gaskamer, but builds another narrative context that remains familiar but unidentifiable.

Nevertheless, it is his hybridization of media that keeps me coming back to his work. The sensation of moving film, rather than a captured photograph, comes not just from rendering from video stills, but showing sequences of images with a subtle shift in time. Kahrs employs a blurring and shifting of images, but also blurs the identity of his subjects, contributing to his seamless combination of the banal and the grotesque. This obscuring of subjects to a point of abstraction, allowing faces to melt off the subjects like those of Francis Bacon’s portraits, elevates while disguising the identity of the mundane, drawing on our cultural over saturation and disconnection from the physicality of violence. Further complicating his role in creating the image, Kahrs paintings and drawings are often shown behind glass, emphasizing the viewer’s separation from the work and further masking the artist’s hand. This masking and obscuring of time combined with the multiple references to media builds more questions than answers, giving someone a place to investigate and question both the history of painting and its relationship to modern life.

Kahrs recent exhibitions have included solo shows with Luhring Augustine in New York and GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, in addition to several group shows at the Phoenix Art Museum, the SFMOMA and Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Kahrs currently lives and works in Berlin.

Wind (Rom), 2009; plastic, poster, wallpaper, spray paint, loops, screws; 209 x 202 cm.

In William Gibson’s 1986 novel Count Zero, an abandoned but sentient AI robot composes art objects from detritus found in space.  Despite being built by a computer from discards and rubbish, these objects have a deeply human gravity—both a grace and a yearning for grace—and are highly prized.   It is precisely this evocative use of materials and imagery that Isa Genzken gives us in Wind, her response to the death of Michael Jackson.  This recent work, at Neugerriemschneider Gallery in Berlin, expertly conjures the agitation between glory and coarseness in celebrity culture.

Five monumental mixed-media works, all from 2009, are hung from the walls of the gallery.  The outlier of the group in materials and scale, Wind (Rom), is composed of pages torn from a floral wall calendar, plastic, satin ribbon, spray paint, and tape.  The other four works are larger and a more intriguing mix of temporary and durable materials: the weight and chill of large copper and aluminum plates clashes with flimsy photocopies provisionally clamped to their edges, and the glitz and promise of mirrored disco tiles is defeated by the crassness of cheap blue painter’s tape.  To say that the work is abject would be somewhat misleading; the scale and materials often point to permanence and beauty, even though it falls short of being fully realized.  In Wind, Genzken tells us that true beauty is not possible under current historical and cultural conditions.

Wind (Michael/David), 2009; plastic, poster, colour copies, mirrored foil, coloured paper, spray paint, tape; 200.5 x 276 cm.

The particular mix of images gives the work lyric force.  Wind (Michael/David)—made of plastic, poster, photocopies, mirrored foil, colored paper, spray paint, and tape—depicts Jackson in his prime: styled, dancing, iconic.  Gold spray paint adorns the cheap posters, giving Jackson a top hat or circling his exposed chest.  The composition is also inflected by a centrally-placed image of the famous marble statue; a small copy of Lochner’s Altar of the City Patrons; and multi-colored curving marks that look like an enlarged thumbprint.  In this way Genzken points the viewer to the distinction of Jackson’s oeuvre, inviting connections that signal individuality, singularity, and exceptionalism.   But on closer inspection she undercuts her own assertions: the posters of Jackson are printed with © Annie Liebowitz, the original author of the photo; ripped from a book, the tattered reproduction of Lochner’s altar has his name and information about the piece at the bottom.  It’s as if Genzken wants to build a new Oz, and then perversely delights in drawing back the curtain on her own construction: The gold? Cheap paint. The rainbow? A tacky photocopy. Our heroes? Well…

Wind (Michael), 2009; copper plate, aluminium plates, colour copies, tape, spray paint; 260.5 x 315.5 cm.

And yet, there is a scavenged poetry, too.  Wind (Michael) uses repetition to evoke a sense of loss.  Against a background of alternating copper and aluminum panels, the piece depicts Jackson in concert, leaping into the air in a dance routine.  The photos (more cheap photocopies) are attached to the first two of the three copper panels, establishing a visual rhythm that points to the blankness of the last panel.  Despite the heroic scale of the piece, the apparent permanence of the metal, and the brightly colored papers, the piece is cold and despairing.

The various compositions of the pieces are anarchic but not disorganized.  Materials, too, are severely contrasting but not completely unharmonious.   If the work is, as stated in the press release, “concerned with the depiction of this immaterial force of nature,” it seems that Genzken shows us a wind that can simultaneously elevate and sully.  In the end, the work feels less specifically about the adoration and dejection of Michael Jackson than about the society that produced him.