Mira Mann at DREI – Art Viewer

Artist: Mira Mann

Exhibition title: mother may recall another

Venue: DREI, Cologne, Germany

Date: September 2 – October 29, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and DREI, Cologne

Mira 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.

Mann’s first solo exhibition at the gallery centers on the eponymous three-channel video mother may recall another (2022) which 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 – a genre of musical storytelling that originated in 17th-century Korea in close relation to local shamanistic ceremonies – 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.

Looking into transcultural exchange and questioning authorship and appropriation, the exhibition furthermore features Mann’ s enlarged replica of a cactus display by Bauhaus designer Marianne Brandt and proposed for serial production at the Ruppelwerk in Gotha around 1930, as well as a small plaster figural group of an Asian mother with her two children from the hand of Brandt herself.

Mira Mann (*1993, Frankfurt am Main) lives and works in Düsseldorf. In 2021, Mann graduated from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Performances and works have been shown at Kunstverein Bielefeld; Galerie Max Mayer; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (both Düsseldorf, all 2022); Rosa Stern, Munich; KIT Kunst im Tunnel; Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark, (both Düsseldorf); PiK Deutz, Cologne; Urbane Künste Ruhr & Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund (all 2021); Simultanhalle, Cologne (2020); Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2019), among others. In collaboration with Anna R. Winder and Thomas Arthur Spallek, Mann co-edits the biannual newspaper Wormhole.

With many thanks to the Neue Sächsische Galerie, Chemnitz