NADJA
MARCIN
From: Germany
Based in: New York
Born: 1982
Main Artistic Theme: Human behavior
Web: www.nadjamarcin.com
Nadja Verena Marcin is an award winning performance and media artist. She focuses on human behavior, elemental emotions and psychological responses linked to role-playing through video, performance and photography.
Nadja’s work has been presented internationally in film festivals and museums.
Zero Gravity
2:11 min Video - PerformanceTampa, Fl
During the Zero Gravity flight experience, the artist quotes from Nietzsche’s famous text God is dead, overwhelmed by the endorphin releasing condition. In an age torn between virtual reality and physical existence, the piece illuminates how the heaviness of the mind can be lifted by a physical environment and vice versa.
OPHELIA
20 min Live Performance + Video SculptureOPHELIA is an architectural live performance and video sculpture, focusing on the human destruction of the biosphere.
La Mujer
17.35 minLive Performance
Goethe Center, Santa Cruz
With La Mujer, Marcin revives the image of a fallen woman inside a live performance.
How to Undress in Front of Your H...
11.26 min, 4K digital cinemaVideo/FilmNew York, USAThe video-performance remake "How to Undress In Front Of Your Husband", replicated from a 1960s ‘how to’ video, depicts the do’s and don’ts of female disrobing, the original video turns this quotidian action into a performance under an authoritarian male gaze.
//KIDS//
13.34 min, 4KVideo/Film
New York, USA
//KIDS// narrates through a conceptual revision of the cult film 'Kids' (New York, 1995, Larry Clark) the interaction of a group of young adults; the smooth transition between shocking rituals and its adaption as lifestyle.
Nadja by Breton
21.23 minLive Performance
Fischer Landau Center, New York
In the live performance 'Nadja by Breton' Marcin alludes to the topography of desire embodied in Breton’s story.
OPHELIA
Minnesota Street Project live performanceBRIDE
C-print41 x 31 in | 105 x 79 cm
Bolivia, 2015
ABOUT THE ARIST
German-born artist Nadja Verena Marcin, lives and works in New York, USA and NRW, Germany. She graduated from the Visual Art Department of New Genre, School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York in 2010, after obtaining a Diploma of Fine Arts from the Department of New Media at Academy of Fine Arts Münster.
In her performance-based work Marcin examines the constructed persona, looking at the way the artist is an implicit figure.
By creating a “theater of cinema” that the audience can be immersed in, Marcin brings awareness through a hyperbolic interpretation of relatable scenarios, enacts symbolic actions, catalyzing the visibility of hidden codes. Her work appropriates familiar imagery and mirrors the ambiguities of human behavior and psychological mechanism.
Selected Exhibitions
OPHELIA - LIVE PERFORMANCE & VIDEO SCULPTURE
OPHELIA - 2018
OPHELIA is an architectural live performance and video sculpture, focusing on the human destruction of the biosphere. OPHELIA invokes historical icons Ophelia (John Everett Millais, 1852), Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Jeff Koons, 1985), and The Werld (Daniil Kharms, 1939)—merging body, art, science, and technology to parallel relationships between the Anthropocene age and gender inequality, speaking to the democratizing power of the meme.
Floating in a salt-water solution in a life-size stainless steel sarcophagus, wearing a breathing mask and Ophelia’s dress, the artist Nadja Verena Marcin will quote text from Daniil Kharms’ The Werld about our limited human subjective perception. The image of a nineteenth-century Ophelia, supported via a breathing mask and reconfigured within a technologically constructed reality, becomes a metaphor for our current state of existence in the Anthropocene Period.