Mira Mann

"Mira Mann is a reverberating plenum of becoming’s variable states, a generation of brimstone eggs in & of themselves, an exemplar of paridaegi spawn. All of them pulse with the rhythm of the rabbit, an evergreen trickster archetype for cultures across the earth. They draw from the cache of that plenum to exact the many characters that populate the resplendent tales from the Pansori tradition, innovated & preserved by the dissidents & dregs of society, fusing that with a hungry sensibility & verdant resourcefulness gained in a life of refining what we call an art practice."

- Aristilde Kirby is a poet and artist based in New York.

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Mann's practice includes time based and site specific modes of working, moving image, and cross-media settings in which Mann explores fictional spaces and storytelling as a medium for visualizing social structures, collective memory, and new narratives within the play of identities. Their discursive scenographies evolve around transcultural relations of human and non-human agents and the glitches they generate between experience and memory, reality and fiction.

Images:

let me tell you en detail (songs of the underwater palace), 2022 (performance still)
De Appel, Amsterdam (with Sol-I So)
Photos: Maarten Nauw; Courtesy the artist and de Appel, Amsterdam

Let me tell you en detail., 2021 (video still)
Single channel video, color, sound
00:17:05

mother may recall another (2022) recounts the story of Shim Cheong, the half-orphaned daughter of a blind man, who sacrifices herself to the sea in order to regain her father's sight. Mann links the story of the pansori tale with remembered experiences of their own mother. The video was filmed at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne as well as in Mokpo, Korea, their mothers hometown, which was largely shaped by the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of the 1970s and Japanese colonialism and which she left at the age of 20.

Narrated on three channels a script consisting of original and manipulated versions of the songs of Shim Cheong, interpreted by Sol-I So, narrates the tale as vocal layer and frame for the video material, that documents the journey of the artist and their mother to her hometown Mokpo, filmed by herself. As auto fictional family drama in allegory to the genre of the road movie and in superposition with documentary elements, the video combines staged scenes from the tale with staged memories of their mother, sister, aunt and cousin, with live performances.


Installation view: Drei, Cologne, 2022
Photo: Cedric Mussano; Courtesy the artist and Drei, Köln

Let me tell you en detail., 2021
Single channel video, color, sound; 00:17:05
Installation view: KIT, Düsseldorf, 2021
Photo: Ivo Faber; Courtesy the artist and KIT, Düsseldorf

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Left and below:
Let me tell you en detail., 2021 (video stills)

Mira Mann was born in 1993 in Frankfurt / Main, Germany. They live and work in Düsseldorf.

The latest solo exhibitions and performances include mother may recall another, Drei, Cologne; let me tell you en detail (songs of the underwater palace), performance in collaboration with Sol-I So), de Appel, Amsterdam; and mercurial operavision b, performance, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany (all 2022). They furthermore contributed to exhibitions at Brücke Museum, Berlin; Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf; and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (all 2022). Upcoming exhibitions will take place at N/A, Seoul (solo); CAN Foundation, Seoul; and Cork Street Banner Commission, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster & Serpentine Galleries, London (all 2023).

Mira Mann co-edits the biannual newspaper Wormhole.


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