Action Manual II

ACTION MANUAL Vol. I / II marks Nadja Verena Marcin’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, unfolding across three venues: the Orangerie at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, and Schloss Rheda. The exhibition situates performance at the center of her practice, highlighting the artist’s persistent engagement with the question of agency—what it means to act, to resist inertia, and to embrace the uncertainty that precedes every gesture.

Marcin stages actions that oscillate between rational and irrational, between humor and despair, between meticulously choreographed video works and eruptive guerrilla performances. Across these registers, she exposes the fragile threshold where action transforms into release—where the body becomes the site of both resistance and vulnerability, where ratio and irration co-exist in uneasy balance.

Vol. II in Rheda juxtaposes the unsettling re-enactments Singing in the Rain and Elephant, where Marcin reconfigures the familiar into scenes of rupture and escape. Here, choreographed bodies falter under violence or absurdity, exposing the dissonance between spectacle and lived fragility. Additional photographs such as Spaghetta, and Homeland, and videos such as Fall and Rise of a Fish expand the inquiry into bourgeois comfort zones and human-animal asymmetries, while the participatory performance Reise nach Ägypten entwines personal refusal, political geography, and childhood play into a meditation on projection, belief, and longing.

Together, the works in ACTION MANUAL Vol. I / II form a shifting manual of action—where every gesture becomes a site of questioning. By colliding irony and earnestness, spectacle and intimacy, Marcin insists that action itself remains a radical and precarious possibility: a fragile opening toward a more original form of being.

Program

Friday, November 17, 2012, 7:00 pm
OPENING

Sunday, November 18, 2012, 10:30 am
PERFORMANCE
Reise nach Ägypten – Bus tour with Nadja Marcin and 40 guests from Dortmunder Kunstverein to the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, and the Schloss Rheda.