Action Manual I

ACTION MANUAL Vol. I / II marks Nadja Verena Marcin’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, unfolding across three venues: the Orangerie at Schloss Rheda, the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, and the Dortmunder Kunstverein. 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.

In Vol. I at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, early and recent works interrogate themes of belonging, intimacy, and performance as intervention: from the melancholic provocations of Eve and No Country, to the disruptive karaoke incursion of Are You Lonesome Tonight, to the subcultural drifting of //KIDS//—a video that reworks Larry Clark’s Kids through the lens of body art and poetic détournement. Sculptural props and drawings extend these works into material traces of lived performance.

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 and videos 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

Wednesday, November 7, 2012, 6:00 pm
WORK IN PROGRESS
For patrons and members of the Dortmunder Kunstverein. The artist is present during the exhibition set-up to answer questions.

Friday, November 9, 2012, 7:00 pm
OPENING

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

Friday, November 23, 2012, 6:30 pm
ARTIST TALK
With Nadja Verena Marcin as part of the official opening of the fourth year of Art Criticism & Curatorial Knowledge at Ruhr University Bochum, with Simone Rudolph, moderated by Linda Schröer.