In her Berlin studio, the German-Irish artist shares her ambitious plans for the upcoming Istanbul Biennial 

Jewel-like organs and bodily brickwork: the gutsy art of Mariechen Danz

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Halfway through our interview,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/25945/Mariechen-Danz" target="_blank">Mariechen Danz&nbsp;</a>breaks into a song. ‘How to know, how to know,’ she chants in a velvety voice, eyes half-closed. ‘The aim was to create a different type of earworm.’ She laughs, stopping dead, then: ‘People would tell me they woke up singing it, which was amazing.’Written when Danz first dabbled with music a decade ago, ‘How to Know’ has lost none of its relevance. Quite the opposite: The lyrics could almost be a mantra for the voraciously curious Berlin-based artist, whose practice ranges from sculpture to installation and performance. Danz goes for the Big Topics – questions around the nature of knowledge, the myth of objectivity, and the relationship between body and writing abound in her oeuvre. Yet each piece is disconcertingly immediate: Her resin-cast organs, colorful humanoids, and mysterious maps are always alluring, almost calling for the hand. It’s as if the artist was attempting to prove that knowledge can be just as physical as it is cerebral – and that the distinction between the two is a cultural construct that viewers would be well advised to shed. Danz is one of the 56 artists to be presented in the upcoming Istanbul Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. Best known for coining the term ‘relational aesthetics’ in the late 1990s, the French art historian has this time turned his hand to the much-debated concept of the Anthropocene, a period defined by human intervention in the natural world. The Anthropocene is today’s era, and Bourriaud chose to title his Turkish biennial ‘The Seventh Continent,’ after the giant plastic waste mass currently drifting across the Pacific Ocean. The exhibition, he writes, ‘is an anthropology of an off-centered world and an archaeology of our times.’ For Danz, it’s also the opportunity to present one of her largest installations to date.&nbsp;

It hasn’t been plain sailing. The biennial’s main venue – initially meant to be an old Golden Horn shipyard on the brink of redevelopment – was abruptly changed a month prior to the biennial’s opening, due to asbestos issues. It was replaced at the last minute by Antrepo 5, a former warehouse slated to become the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture next year. Danz’s project, originally inspired by the shipyard’s structure, was first conceived as site-specific. Together with a small team of assistants, she worked in an Istanbul factory to make 2,455 bricks based on the shipyard’s own – a process she describes during Art Basel’s studio visit as ‘one of the most challenging productions I have ever experienced.’ Danz’s bricks are not mere construction blocks – nor are they mere copies. Each one has been manually imprinted with medical models of human organs: brains, lungs, kidneys. Together the bricks make up an anthropomorphic system of signs, as intriguing as it is indecipherable. Due to the venue change, the whole piece has had to be reconceptualized, but at Antrepo 5, like at the shipyard, each brick can be seen as reinjecting a human touch within Istanbul’s increasingly sleek city fabric. They reinforce a sense of subjectivity that’s at odds with corporate and cultural urban development. Born in 1980 to a German father and an Irish mother, Danz grew up in Dublin. While her peers headed to London to study, she made her way to Berlin, where she’s been based for the best part of the past two decades. Widely shown in Germany, the artist was much noticed at the 2017 Venice Biennale for a multimedia installation that doubled up as a stage for her operatic performance Knot in Arrow: Ore Oral Orientation (2017). Danz speaks fast, in a thick Irish accent peppered with German words. Sporting a shift dress adorned with constellations, she goes from one piece to the next at a staccato pace. She variously describes the intestine as a ‘long-term interest,’ jumps from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Arabic astronomy, and explains the shamanic rituals she applied to a lying clay figure presented in Berlin’s former bear zoo (Womb Tomb: Worry Scrolls, 2018). The speed of Danz’s delivery matches her urge to cover the stratospheric range of her artistic universe. A two-hour interview is clearly not enough.

In many ways, Danz’s studio mirrors her kaleidoscopic references. Reproductions of oriental miniatures, ancient bronzes, and her own lung sculptures are pinned to a world map on the wall. The space is chockablock with racks of flamboyant performance costumes – meters of thick fabrics featuring motifs as varied as hurricane charts and anatomical drawings. Plastic organs and bones are strewn across most surfaces. A life-size cow’s digestive system saved from the skip is tucked away in a corner. Next to it lies a prone clay figure – the precursor to another, supine body already on its way to Turkey. The shipyard-inspired bricks are only one part of the Istanbul project: the biennial presentation will also feature resin casts encasing semiprecious stones, a standing humanoid made with medical models, and various existing and in-production artworks. ‘Things that concern me can always be brought back to the body,’ Danz answers, when asked where her fascination for the corporeal comes from. ‘There was never a time when it wasn’t the body, whether as the medium, the carrier, or the source.’ Throughout her practice, the artist has consistently sought to debunk the idea that systems of knowledge – be they medical, astronomical, geographical, or linguistic – are based on universal truths. These systems, she suggests, are inherently subjective, marred in the prejudices and limitations of their times. The body, marker of the subjective, is for many one of the last terrae incognitae. ‘Everyone presumes they know their own body, but in my experience most people don’t know how their body functions. [When I show people one of my sculptures] they are like, “Wow, that’s a really big tongue,” when they are looking at the pancreas.’

Read through the lens of the Anthropocene, Danz’s practice raises an important question, namely how to confront the still-prevailing apathy towards ecological disasters. ‘Real empathy would demand a radical response with real effect – and that doesn’t seem to happen just because people get sad about animals eating plastic bags,’ says Danz. Her solution? Locating the Anthropocene’s impact in our own bodies. ‘It’s already there, through the microplastics we are ingesting,’ she adds. ‘It’s entering our bloodstream.’ Humans – we – suffer from our own activities as much as everything else on earth. If the mass destruction of flora and fauna is not enough to mobilize the powers that be on a global scale, a better understanding of how our own species is affected might prove a stronger incentive, Danz suggests. It’s too early to say how any of this will eventually translate in the final Istanbul presentation, but the artist hopes the work will further embody her key concerns. ‘I’m always trying to reconsider our own functioning, our conditioning and comprehension structure, the hierarchy we are embedded in, and the way we go about things,’ she says. With her stamped bricks, jewel-like organ sculptures, and anthropomorphic figures, she will be inviting viewers to radically question their own set beliefs and positions in the world. It’s a wildly ambitious call, but few are as well equipped creatively as Danz to take on the challenge.Mariechen Danz is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1315/Wentrup" target="_blank">Wentrup</a>, Berlin. Coline Milliard is Art Basel's Deputy Editor. Top image:&nbsp;Mariechen Danz. Photo by&nbsp;Ali Yavuz Ata&nbsp;for Art Basel.

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In her Berlin studio, the German-Irish artist shares her ambitious plans for the upcoming Istanbul Biennial