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Marlie Mul’s artistic practice manifests somewhere in between sculpture, painting, print, fashion, distribution, writing, experiments in branding, the social, the flimsy, and the virtual.
References to the flowing, the liquid, the oozing, recur in Marlie Mul’s work on a formal level and metaphoric themes – from her folded paintings, to flaccid silicone works planted with thinning (synthetic) hairs, to facsimile sculptures of rain puddles and enquiries into the history of tobacco smoke. Her work is intricately fabricated while keeping a strong DIY character.
In May 2017 Marlie Mul publicly cancelled a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow, due to impassable working circumstances, which lead to an advertisement of said cancellation inside the galleries of the museum itself. In the aftermath of that situation, she co-initiated the counter-institutional fanzine ground together with writer and poet Harry Burke, and published the book CANCELLED in 2018. With the project PMS she takes on a form of 'branding-drag' that employs the accessible format of the t-shirt as a tool for image circulation and the visualising of community, the brand itself taking as theme the human body's hormonal ups and downs. She runs HERMANY, a nomadic project space that sets out to blur the specificity of exhibition audiences by continuously changing its content, medium, and location. Hermany has hosted the work of various artists and performers, and was also the project name under which she initiated the collective projects "Fashion Café" (2019) and "Fashion Time" (2022) wherein the spectacle of fashion was taken as a starting point for the making and presentation of art works. Since 2021 she works on various series of sculptures intricately made from silicone and (synthetic) hair.
Excerpt from the article "Leda and the Swan" in Spike Magazine (issue July 2021) by Max Henry on Marlie Mul's solo exhibition "Sperms Going to a Fashion Show" at Croy Nielsen Vienna in May 2021:
"As contemporary art diffuses into armchair sociology, there are nonetheless some constants to hang your hat on. It’s the good fortune of time immemorial that provocative artists take familiar things and pivot them with transgressive acts to shock the senses. Take the cryptic art of Marlie Mul. Diffident she is not. She crafts innocuous-looking objects in various stages of construction that melt and terraform like 3D prints stuck in an outmoded software program. Something in her sculptures has gone absurdly wrong, like a morphed GIF, scrambled by the corruption of its data. This is what makes them tick. Their lightness of touch belies the weightiness of their industrial materials. The functional bumps into the dysfunctional. They wed. They are real. One can laugh at the pattern-recognition gone wrong, yet still be grounded in the rudiments of her brazen sculptural derring-do."
Contact:
marliemul@gmail.com
Contact galleries:
Croy Nielsen, Vienna
Rob Tufnell, London
Educational work
Next to her art practise Marlie Mul works in art education. She is currently chair of the Course Committee of Visual Arts, and a coordinator of the Master in Fine Arts programme at KASK (Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten) in Ghent, Belgium. Between 2018 and 2023 Marlie Mul was head of the MFA programme Work.Master in the Visual Arts Department at HEAD–Genève (Geneva University of Art and Design). She has previously taught courses at the Architectural Association in London, and was a guest teacher at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, Central St Martins School of Art in London, La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels and UDK in Berlin.
Curatorial work
2018- HERMANY
2013 Door Between Either an Or (curated by Marlie Mul and Judith Hopf), Kunstverein München
Public Talks
2024 UDK Universität der Künste, Berlin – lecture/artist talk
2023 MUHKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen – artist talk with a focus on my fashion-related projects.
2021 KASK School of Arts Gent, KASKLecture – artist talk
2019 Wiels, Brussels – “CANCELLED” – reading and artist talk
2019 Motto Books, Berlin – “CANCELLED” – reading and artist talk
2019 Croy Nielsen, Vienna – “CANCELLED” – reading and artist talk
2019 ART Genève conference programme – artist talk
2018 FRAC Lorraine, Metz – artist talk (as the collective « ground »)
2018 HEAD Genève MA Arts Visuels – artist talk
2016 Kunsthalle Wien – Series: « HiStories/ Geschichte(n) » – performative lecture
2016 Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam – artist talk
2015 Sir John Cass Faculty of Arts / London Metropolitan University – artist talk
2014 ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts, London – artist talk
2014 Goethe-Institute Dublin / Irish Museum of Modern Art – artist talk
2014 Architectural Association School of Architecture, London – artist talk
2013 Office fédéral de la culture de Lausanne / « Post Digital Cultures Symposium » – artist talk
Education
2008-2009 MFA Architecture History and Critical Thinking, Architectural Association, London
2000-2003 BA Sculpture, Maastricht Institute of Arts, Maastricht
1998-2000 BA Fashion and Textile Design, St Joost School of Art and Design, Breda
Residencies
2023 Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, BE
2018 WIELS, Brussels, BE
2018 FRAC Lorraine, Metz, FR
2016 Fondation Boghossian, Villa Empain, Brussels, BE
2016 21er Haus/Belvedere Museum, Vienna, AT
2014 Pinakothek der Moderne (Kunstzeitraum/Südhausbau), Munich, DE
2013 BAR Project, Barcelona, ES
2008 Fondazione Ratti, Como, IT