MARCK: Video Sculpture Installations

April 20, 2016

Imagine you pass a sign as you are walking along a foggy road. Seeming to have made progress in your journey, you look around, only to see that you have come back to the sign you passed earlier, though you had been walking straight. In no way affected, you calmly shrug it off and once again start down this road, hopeful of a different outcome. But there isn’t one. You’re stuck in an infinite loop. That is what I feel from the video sculpture of Swiss artist MARCK, especially in his piece Tauchen 2010 in which depicts a woman swimming back and forth between two identical pools. It is a hopeful, hopeless exploration of boundaries.

Having been an avid tinkerer of electronics since his childhood, MARCK welds metal, installs glass, and wires screens to present his work. His videos usually portray women enclosed in small spaces endlessly testing the limitations of their prisons, as if to break free. These women, as the preferred subject of the pieces, seem unruffled by their predicament. They explore their spaces with a calm curiosity. MARCK films his models in front of green screens, in pools, and in moving wood boxes to create his looped videos.

“[The women] function as symbols for a limited space of action provided by society in which women find themselves.” ~MARCK

MARCK also explores another level of boundaries in terms of his medium by breaking the flat plane of film and video media. In pieces such as “Untitled” LCD panel, iron /2011 8 +1 EA, where a woman is engulfed in flames, this barrier is broken by incorporating physical, three-dimensional forms such as fire, smoke, and pendulums. This is very successful in causing the installations to become part of the viewer’s world. Whether physical boundaries or psychological ones, MARCK’s mesmerizing video installations will have you exploring your own limitations.