Co-founded by Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel, between 2013 and 2015 PRAXES Center
for Contemporary Art presented four half-year cycles of exhibitions,
publications, and events—each revolving around two unassociated artistic practices—in Berlin.
Expanding its timeframe and moving this experiment to a new context, as part of
the triennial Bergen Assembly 2016 PRAXES developed a year-long episodic and
itinerant investigation centered on the work of two artists only: Lynda Benglis and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd.
30 August–28 September
3 October–9 November
13 November–13 December
Drop
And Bird
Frog And
Matt Mullican, Untitled (Pricking my finger / Bleeding green blood), 1973–74.
Still from video, 3.43 min, ed. 2/3.
Testing the capacities of materials such as crystals, clay, garnet sand, and
pigment blocks against forces of compression, gravity, technology, or sheer
observation, Christina Mackie’s over thirty-year-long practice circumvents conceptual strategies and turns
towards a meticulous investigation of the world of things and its
interconnections. Often displayed in itinerant installations,
her oeuvre broadens into a continuum rather than a series of insulated works. At
PRAXES these connections unfolded in
three parts over Autumn 2014. Combining developments in recent and upcoming
work, the first installment—“Drop” —posited the exhibition space as a crystalline test site of material experiments
still in process. The two following exhibition modules, “And Bird” and “Frog And”, took their cue from a dual monitor work from 2000, Frog and Bird, in which a frog seemingly listens to a singing blackbird.
Articulated in a range of formats from photographs, pencil drawings,
performances, texts, and pictographic charts,
Matt Mullican has continuously tracked the constructions
of subjective realities by recurrently transgressing into and probing our
relationship with abstract or imaginary realms. Drawing on his long-term
investigation of the frameworks of perception, Mullican’s initial exhibition module of his Cycle of exhibitions, events, and
publications at PRAXES, “Third Person”, focused on the third-person point of view and its narrative variations and
potentials as explored in his work from the early 1970s to today. The following
exhibition module, “Second Person”, centered on a string of live lectures and performances, turning to the artist’ s current interest in the implications of the you—the strengthened identification with a fictive character through a second-person
point of view.
Matt Mullican, Sleeping Child, 1973 / 2014, installation view at PRAXES.
Courtesy of Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Christina Mackie, Sketch for Drop, 2014, installation view at PRAXES.
Pushing his own subjectivity against the subterrain of the imaginary is a
decisive strain in Matt Mullican’ s practice.
While under hypnosis, he has repeatedly forced himself to act, draw, and
register in an altered mental state, testing a third-person capacity he has
named “That Person”. Alongside material stemming from this exercise, the exhibition module “Third Person” displayed, among other works, a series of black-and-white photographs probing
the individual as a symbolic figure, the Untitled (Birth to Death List) recounting of a woman’s life; and a set of works circulating Glen, a stick figure, drawn from the
early 1970s and onwards. Coming full circle, in an abstraction that is as
simple as it is subtle, Mullican s Sleeping Child is the stick figure, alive and fully absorbed in slumbering, a third-person
narrative of a wooden plank and a person resting as one.
“Drop ” centered on Christina Mackie’s initial blueprints for a series of ten-meter, dye-drenched silk filters,
exhibited at Chicago’s Renaissance Society in 2014. At PRAXES, the two white nylon maquettes were
anchored by new samples of found and fabricated material indicating future
processes of dipping, dyeing, coating, collecting, and molding.
Christina Mackie, Frog and Bird, 2000.
The exhibition modules "And Bird " and "Frog And" assemble existing pieces
spanning Mackie’s more than thirty years of production. Taking its cue from a dual monitor work
from 2000, Frog and Bird, "And Bird" focused on notions of performative matter and fabricated or
perceived interactions, among these the stripy sculpture Spirit of the Planet Saturn.
Performance documentation, Matt Mullican: "Second Person" at PRAXES.
Photo: Agnieska Roguski
Running from mid-October, the second exhibition module by Matt Mullican at
PRAXES, entitled “Second Person”, turned to a subject that the artist is currently examining, namely that of the
you in his practice. Probing and unfolding a hypothesis of strengthened
identification with an imaginary character through a second-person point of
view, the exhibition space became a vehicle for Mullican to address audiences
directly in performances, lectures, and conversations. By returning to early
live works, contemplating the artist ’s practice in its entirety, revisiting the studio archive, inviting speakers
with specialized knowledge, and providing a framework for a new performance,
PRAXES offered itself to Mullican and audiences as a collective research
facility. The one-off activities were accompanied by a series of accumulated
displays of performances props, archival material, documentation, and artworks
related to the unfolding investigation.
Christina Mackie, Foo, 1994. Film still.
Born in 1956 in England and raised in Canada before relocating to London in the
1970s, Christina Mackie has exhibited extensively with recent solo exhibitions
including The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014), Kunsthal Charlottenborg,
Copenhagen (2012), and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012). A monograph on her
work, supported by the Contemporary Art Society, UK, will be released in 2015.
Born in 1951 and trained in Los Angeles and New York City, where the artist
still partly resides, Matt Mullican is based in and works from Berlin, teaching
as professor of sculpture at the Art Academy in Hamburg (HfbK). Mullican
recently had solo exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2013), Haus der
Kunst, Munich (2011), Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2010–2011), and Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne (2010). His work was also included in “The Encyclopedic Palace” exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia (2013).
PRAXES
Bergen Assembly
Østre Skostredet 5 – 7
Bergen 5017, Norway
PRAXES’s Berlin venue has closed. In 2016 PRAXES will open its new iteration in Bergen,
as part of the Bergen Assembly
