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Max Mueller Bhavan | India Bangalore

Marius Land
bangaloREsident@Daily Dump

Marius Land, born 1989 in Witten, studied visual communication at FH Potsdam, before finishing his Diploma in Photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig.
 
Marius Land © © Florian Glaubitz Marius Land © Florian Glaubitz
In his works, Marius deals with the representation and order of the commodity society, based on its everyday remains.
"Where there is system, there is dirt" (Mary Douglas). The unknown is always before us. No matter how narrowly we draw the borders, there are always objects exceeding them, by revoking from our comprehension. Latent objects, which had a distinctive function, are suddenly without and just there. Matter out of place, strange and arbitrarily, when we cannot point to it and say, this is this and that. Living with the unknown might be a question of perspectives. Uncertainty and potential.
 
Marius deals, theoretically and practically, with the question of how far the the terms malfunction, litter and chaos can be seen through alternative scopes, instead of them just being a one-dimensional error in a capitalistic value system. The aesthetic potentials of the raw and random, are put into new relationships through image-, text- and object montages. Reaction. Everyday rests as a productive blur between functionalised and rigid systems. Detours. Navigation in the unknown. Staying with the trouble.
 
For the bangaloREsidency@Daily Dump, Marius wants to challenge the borders of the term function by researching the temporal everyday conversion of things, as in the Indian idea of "jugaad". This Hindi term means a smart workaround or quick fix, deriving from the lack of proper resources. What do we have, instead of what do we need. Therefore always staying flexible towards problems and finding provisional frugal solutions, rather than planning for rigid long-term perfection. Jugaad is deeply routed in the everyday Indian culture, but also became a legit innovation strategy for bottom-up product development with minimal costs. It oscillates between the lack of delivering proper solutions, by this being the main quality at the same time. My artistic approach is to discover "jugaad" through situational photographic still lifes, throughout the daily street routine in Bangalore and get to know the people and their "jugaad" mindsets through conversations. What are the aesthetic qualities of the provisional or unfinished? How could we could learn from this approach towards things? An approach that is not clearly dividing into categories, but leaving a grey zone, where function and dysfunction become blurry.
 
Marius Land's works have been shown in different contexts and places. As part of his artistic practice, he understands working in dialogue. He was part of the gallery collective KASKL in Berlin and works as artistic-pedagogic staff for the German Youth Photography Award. Together with Moritz Freudenberg, he initiated a workshop project in Tbilisi, Georgia as part of a DAAD-funded residency at GeoAIR.

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