MYRTHE VAN DER MARK
YEAH, BUT WHO? I MIGHT KNOW HER.
Japanese Slipper (2024); Cocktail Glass, Midori, Cointreau, Lime Juice, Maraschino Cherry, Dry Ice, Misty Stix, Variable dimensions; open edition
Work can take many different forms, as varied as the environments, tools, skills, goals, and institutions around a worker. For De Langste Dag Myrthe van der Mark will view ‘a workplace’ as human activity contributing towards the goods and services. This refers to a general activity of performing tasks, whether they are paid or unpaid, formal or informal. It encompasses any effort or activity directed towards achieving a particular goal. She approaches serving staff as an example of a common profession, attending to customers by supplying them with a cocktail as requested: Japanese Slipper. The passage of time is represented by the sublimation process of dry ice, incorporated into the cocktail. Here, the word sublimation is used to describe an exchange of "bodies" and "spirits" similar to laboratory phase transition between solids and gases.
Price: €7.40
Presented at Mu.ZEE & KAAP
Ostend (BE)
Japanese Slipper (2024); Cocktail Glass, Midori, Cointreau, Lime Juice, Maraschino Cherry, Dry Ice, Misty Stix, Variable dimensions; open edition
Work can take many different forms, as varied as the environments, tools, skills, goals, and institutions around a worker. For De Langste Dag Myrthe van der Mark will view ‘a workplace’ as human activity contributing towards the goods and services. This refers to a general activity of performing tasks, whether they are paid or unpaid, formal or informal. It encompasses any effort or activity directed towards achieving a particular goal. She approaches serving staff as an example of a common profession, attending to customers by supplying them with a cocktail as requested: Japanese Slipper. The passage of time is represented by the sublimation process of dry ice, incorporated into the cocktail. Here, the word sublimation is used to describe an exchange of "bodies" and "spirits" similar to laboratory phase transition between solids and gases.
Price: €7.40
Presented at Mu.ZEE & KAAP
Ostend (BE)
THE ECSTATIC BEING
2024, performance / room-sized installation with a.o. orange shelter rescue camping tent, memory foam, daylight therapy light, Belladonna drops, music compositions and recordings made by Joachim Badenhorst during the 3-days performances at the 8th Yokohama Triennale
The title is derived from the exhibition The Ecstatic Being — a group exhibition at STUK in Leuven, June 2023 — for which Van der Mark was commissioned. The performance and installation are part of a growing body of work developed around ideas of metamorphosis and form-changing. The performance in collaboration with Joachim Badenhorst is derived from the Mazdaznan teachings. The focus lies on body-related rituals, singing with rhythmic movements and re-channel internal energies. The objects in the installation are residues or traces from the performances held on March 14 -16.
Presented at Yokohama Museum of Art
Yokohama (JPN)
2024, performance / room-sized installation with a.o. orange shelter rescue camping tent, memory foam, daylight therapy light, Belladonna drops, music compositions and recordings made by Joachim Badenhorst during the 3-days performances at the 8th Yokohama Triennale
The title is derived from the exhibition The Ecstatic Being — a group exhibition at STUK in Leuven, June 2023 — for which Van der Mark was commissioned. The performance and installation are part of a growing body of work developed around ideas of metamorphosis and form-changing. The performance in collaboration with Joachim Badenhorst is derived from the Mazdaznan teachings. The focus lies on body-related rituals, singing with rhythmic movements and re-channel internal energies. The objects in the installation are residues or traces from the performances held on March 14 -16.
Presented at Yokohama Museum of Art
Yokohama (JPN)
AIRDROP
2024, performance
UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material operating on the basis of a gift economy. AirDrop derived from a selection of videos from the Dance section of UbuWeb in collaboration with artist Louise Delanghe. The setting of this bootleg series is a needle punch mandarin carpet, created through Van der Mark’s installation Girl lives in the village. Sculptress. If you must know., at Cc Strombeek. The carpet bears the traces from 29 skylight domes imprinted through LED light into the orange carpet over time. Delanghe indicates the rhythm of the choreography, and the registration of the work was transmitted through AirDrop by the curator of the exhibition.
Presented at Avee Gallery
Kortrijk (BE)
2024, performance
UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material operating on the basis of a gift economy. AirDrop derived from a selection of videos from the Dance section of UbuWeb in collaboration with artist Louise Delanghe. The setting of this bootleg series is a needle punch mandarin carpet, created through Van der Mark’s installation Girl lives in the village. Sculptress. If you must know., at Cc Strombeek. The carpet bears the traces from 29 skylight domes imprinted through LED light into the orange carpet over time. Delanghe indicates the rhythm of the choreography, and the registration of the work was transmitted through AirDrop by the curator of the exhibition.
Presented at Avee Gallery
Kortrijk (BE)
GIRL LIVES IN THE VILLAGE. SCULPTRESS. IF YOU MUST KNOW.
2024, solo exhibition
The orange atmosphere experienced when entering the exhibition is the result of a distinct range of wavelengths within the visible spectrum. The name of this colour is derived from the homonymous fruit, which procures this colour from carotenes, a photosynthetic pigment that converts sunlight into chemical energy. In fact, while we call the fruit orange, it actually retains every other colour whilst rejecting the orange frequency. The colour orange is associated with fire, energy, amusement, danger, extraversion and the unconventional, as well as with taste and aroma. Next to being an important colour in Hinduism and Buddhism, it has a well established connection with the Netherlands through the House of Orange. The current chromatic circumstances are presumed to be connected to the origins of the girl in question.
While the basis of the module has been made orange, an adjacent separate space emits pure white light. Two separate growing processes integrate the pigments dissolved into the water: the creation of a crystal structure, and the absorption by the vascular system of the carnations. The organic and mineral kingdoms depicting the dance of the spheres.
Skylight domes are produced from thermoformed polycarbonate, and intended to allow natural zenith light into vast interior spaces. Optimal lighting in buildings is an essential factor for physical and mental performance. In the absence of daylight, the constellation of artificially illuminated skylights presented reveals a variety of inner worlds. Each separate sphere contains the fruits of a different participating person, the Doors of Perception copied on their own printer, each page with personal annotations. Finally the filled forms are scanned into the mother machine, back into the hive mind.
Myrthe van der Mark retraces the hidden pathways of ancient teachings in her elusive practice. Using seemingly trivial elements we encounter in daily life, she triggers presence of mind in the present moment through the evocation of distant times and places. Researching texts devised to guide us out of the psychic entanglement with the abstract concepts that slowly cemented the fortifications of our worldview into a gilded cage, an entropic network started to unfold.
Scattered around the world wide web, labyrinthine libraries and sacred spaces of social harmony, rumours of Mazdaznan leading from the Temple Association through the Brotherhood to the occult origins of Bauhaus crossed with parallel paths. Traces of Bas Jan Ader’s ultimate expedition via Ouspensky’s writings and The Fourth Way by Gurdjieff’s legacy to Theosophy, Sufism and Tantrism. Having had an Anthroposophical education incorporated into a performing arts initiation herself, the resonance of these complementary voices started synchronizing into a transcendental (celestial) choir.
Upon reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, we come across the first page, dedicated: ‘For M’. Myrthe accepted the Gift of several dozens of friends, relatives and different people encountered by chance along the way, who each marked their passage through the pages of this remarkable document in their own particular style, from their personal perspective, connecting the specific to the universal in their own individual form.
Presented at Cc Strombeek
Strombeek (BE)
IT, IT IS USUAL TO ADD ROSE WHICH IS FOUR ROWS. IT IS USUAL TO ADD IT.
2024, performance, edition of handkerchiefs
For Beyond the Black Box, Myrthe van der Mark presented a new performance and room-sized installation on both the ephemeralness and sturdiness of life.
Through this work, Van der Mark explores the symbolism of braids, the colours of mourning, accompanying scents, flower arrangements, architectural clothing, accessories, tableware and small, elaborate hair works. Touching upon the world of object and speech, Van der Mark weaves together contemporary life, as if it is a non-narrative film with its own laws. A landscape, a portrait, a still life. In collaboration with Joachim Badenhorst.
Presented at de Brakke Grond
Amsterdam (NL)
