MARIANNE VLASCHITS
2016-09-26If you type the phrase woman on mars into the Google image search, a ghostlike figure appears across the first dozen hits, dated 2015. She is caught wandering through the borealis basin, stepping between oxidized rock formations as the Mars Curiosity Rover documents her from afar. She looks so agile, so at ease on this red smoldering planet – more so than her male counterpart, sitting back on earth, his eyes pressed against the pixels of the transmitted image through the void-like lens of his robotic rover. Land-bound he can only stare impotent into the screen, yearning for his own astral projection.
Marianne Vlaschits’s exhibition offers us the new cosmos as a social system, where females hold the primary power. Predominantly through travel, political leadership, moral authority and social privilege. Culture is paramount in this new world and maintained at the highest value for each space traveling unit and its users. Vlaschits turns the gallery into a blueprint for an interstellar spaceship designed for comfort, not too unlike a cruise liner in the Bahamas but for life. She also extends the user’s ability to travel via a mind-altering digital video that plays with the effects of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or N,N-DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound that offers the traveller a rapid onset of action and affect – holidaying has never been so unreal.
Vlaschits’s radical solo female commander narrative and progressive space offers a disturbance in the systems of patriarchy – leaving behind the macho matter and their binary tech gadgets staring and lusting at the sun until they eventually go blind with lost pride.
Opposite – Television, 2016
Exhibition runs through to October 29th, 2016
DUVE Berlin
Gitschiner Strasse 94/94a (Entrance D, Floor 2)
10969 Berlin
Germany
