Mara Diener - Extended Walk

Mara Diener – Extended Walk
Extended Walk – the title of the exhibition is less a fixed
program than a space for association: the idea of a strict
march merely introduces the implicit subtext of the
exhibition. To a greater degree, the way the world is
organized – and consequently also power structures – are
questioned.

The drawings, paintings, installations and animations remain
vague and a precise march through the exhibition is
impossible for the visitor. Rather, the totality of the spatial
composition Diener presents in cubus-m is an invitation to
abandon conventional paths and to experience something
beyond one’s own boundaries.

Large format, graphite drawings, which seem to spread out
endlessly on long rolls of paper, hang on the wall like
historical propaganda flags or are placed randomly on the
floor. They depict cloudy, almost naturalistic universes. Here
the extension in space is particularly evident: the motifs no
longer allow for contours and burst out of the frame. They
bear cryptic signs, algorithms, codes rendered in ink, which
neither disambiguate the depicted objects nor make them
‘readable’ as a structure. The fleetingness, the softness of the
images requires heavy weights in order to hold these
‘exploded drawings’ down to the floor.

The paintings present rearrangements as Utopia, without an
organizing subject or tangible things, and finally as a blank
space and a blind spot in the system. This is also not resolved
in possible figures of identification or narrative moments. The
promised reorganization of the world unmasks itself as a
totalitarian attempt at explanation.

Diener’s works reveal deconstructed object-worlds – almost
devoid of color, open-ended, processual and abstract
representations that no longer indicate a world familiar to us,
but nonetheless evoke references in their suggestiveness.

Ultimately, they attempt to visualize ways of thinking that
challenge the viewer to reconcile and to reflect upon his or
her own experiences.

Isolde Nagel