Mascha Danzis
Affirmation zur Adorno
Video-Installation, 1 Projektion, 5min 2019
Four objects are placed in the scene: a garden chair, a classic office chair, a bizarrely shaped desk and a futuristic lamp. The voice-over is reading the text based on all the canons from YouTube video affirmations. Affirmation (from the Latin “affirmatio” — confirmation) is a short phrase that contains a verbal formula. Such phrases, if repeated many times, are believed to reinforce the desired image or attitude in the subconscious. Objects which are subjected to the gesture of criticism of mass culture create their own world through affirmations and assert criticism as the basis of their ability for material discursive practices. By reading affirmations, objects allow themselves to cross the boundaries of the positivity in order to see the “other and the unknown” according to Adorno — something that always remains outside the process of cognition-identification. In other words, objects present themselves as things but not as mass culture products. The style of the video is on the border between classic commercials and well-known ASMR video clips, which gives the event a dramatic validity.
Interdisciplinary artist, she works as a video artist and conceptual photographer. She graduated from the Academy of Art in Kassel at the Faculty of Visual Communication under the direction of Prof Björn Melhus and Prof. Bernhard Prinz, where in 2005 she received the highest award by the Kassel Academy of Art for the film “Lucy.” As part of the postgraduate program at the Berlin University of the Arts, she studied the perception of video installations in the exhibition space by the viewer. Since 2016 — Associate Professor at Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices in the Field of Arts, Faculty of Liberal Art and Sciences Saint Petersburg University
