The Solo Project

At The Solo Project in Basel (2011), Jens Fehring Gallery presents a solo booth dedicated to Nadja Verena Marcin, showcasing the breadth of her practice across video, live performance, and performance-based photography. The presentation highlights Marcin’s distinctive use of her own identity and presence to interrogate the depths and limits of social behavior, cultural rituals, and the vulnerabilities they reveal.

Her works fracture seemingly fixed conditions and reassemble them in playful, surprising ways. Viewers, placed in a deceptive state of safety, encounter situations that appear trustworthy but are gradually exposed as social constructs—humorously questioned, destabilized, and reimagined. The result is an enduring emotional intensity that opens new ways of seeing the systems and connections shaping everyday life.

Central to the booth is the twelve-minute video Hotel (2010), created in Marcin’s hometown New York. The work unfolds as a fragmented narrative, intercut with intimate confessions, abrupt changes of setting, and symbolic gestures that push its characters to emotional and physical extremes. Blending striking imagery, surreal actions, and prosaic text, Hotel creates a seamless shift between reality and dreamlike abstraction. Its visceral quality and conceptual depth invite viewers into multiple dimensions of engagement—emotional, intellectual, and perceptual—mirroring the fleeting tension of live performance while asserting autonomy as a self-reflexive video work.

Through this presentation, Marcin’s art reveals its core: a layered, multi-dimensional practice that intentionally overwhelms in order to transform perception, collapsing the boundaries between personal mythologies and shared cultural systems.