Daniel Steegmann Mangrané: Dog Eye

A certain ghostliness inheres Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Münster. We are faced with various appearances whose existence we may doubt or which we simply have not really paid attention to, since they tend to stay under the radar or we somehow fell for their disguise. Perhaps we just haven’t attached any importance to them, even though they are always present, always around us. The focus is on something invisible and nonetheless immanent in the world, inevitably comprising a confrontation with one’s own non-seeing—inscribed in the field of consciousness as a blind spot, mocking any availability to the world and the self, and ultimately causing cracks in the concept of being.

With Dog Eye the Kunsthalle Münster is presenting the first solo exhibition of the artist in a German institution. His works—comprising installations, films, sound-based works, photographs, drawings, holograms and sculptures—are marked by a poetic approach of overlapping geometric and abstract forms with organic elements: branches, leaves, insects and recently also dogs serve as integral components of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s works. He combines and intertwines these to create an overall structure that subtly brings us to question our own position in the world, and thus also our attitude toward our environment. We are called upon to rethink the prevailing western perception based on binary thinking, in terms of subject and object, nature and culture. Significant to Steegmann Mangrané’s artistic practice is, among others, the philosophy of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who is known, in addition to the idea of “the decolonization of thought”, for his concept of multinaturalist perspectivism, based on the indigenous peoples of America’s belief that everything is either human or animistic. The artist is concerned with finding a visual mode of expression for these thoughts.

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Münster assembles more recent and older works by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané. Centred around the two films, Fog Dog (2019/2020) and Phasmides (2012), arises a network of artworks involving a wide range of media. This survey illustrates the artist’s interest in versatile forms of perception. In his works he thinks through and/or with form, for which he draws from a diversity of media. One finds various references to the tradition of geometric abstraction by representatives of the neo-concrete movement such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, whose pioneering work in the second half of the 20th century called for replacing the beholders’ mere observation of artworks with their complete involvement.

Curator: Merle Radtke

Accompanying the exhibition, a booklet with texts by Juliana Fausto, Philosophy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil and Merle Radtke, Director of Kunsthalle Münster, will be released.

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