Marianne Vlaschits

If you type the phrase woman on mars into the Google image search, a ghostlike figure appears across the first dozen hits, dated 2015. She is caught wandering through the borealis basin, stepping between oxidized rock formations as the Mars Curiosity Rover documents her from afar. She looks so agile, so at ease on this red smoldering planet – more so than her male counterpart, sitting back on earth, his eyes pressed against the pixels of the transmitted image through the void-like lens of his robotic rover. Land-bound he can only stare impotent into the screen, yearning for his own astral projection.

Marianne Vlaschits’s exhibition offers us the new cosmos as a social system, where females hold the primary power. Predominantly through travel, political leadership, moral authority and social privilege. Culture is paramount in this new world and maintained at the highest value for each space traveling unit and its users. Vlaschits turns the gallery into a blueprint for an interstellar spaceship designed for comfort, not too unlike a cruise liner in the Bahamas but for life. She also extends the user's ability to travel via a mind-altering digital video that plays with the effects of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or N,N-DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound that offers the traveller a rapid onset of action and affect - holidaying has never been so unreal. Vlaschits’s radical solo female commander narrative and progressive space offers a disturbance in the systems of patriarchy – leaving behind the macho matter and their binary tech gadgets staring and lusting at the sun until they eventually go blind with lost pride.

Look Magazine ran the cover story that controversially asked “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” in the 1960s. Eventually NASA concluded that women surpass the abilities of men in the space race through their size and physical aptitude. The Cosmos has always held a sexist bias towards women as far as innovative recreational living outside earth in the past decade. After space travel became a necessity rather than only a hobby intended for evolutionary progression, the innovative idea of having a second home soon became the meaning of life for most humans on earth. It became clear as being the most intelligent living organism on the planet we must transcend our own timely demise via the Earth’s core infrastructure and resources. Space seemed to offer itself through science and a then restricted economy to be the new matriarchal society. With *a disturbance traveling through a medium*, Marianne Vlaschits unties this hypothetical knot and creates a world that synthesizes these possibilities into an affirmative feminist reality.

LONG LIVE THE MATRIARCHAL MARS AS THE NEW COSMOS AND SPACE.

Text by Penny Rafferty

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The Commander wakes up from the tweeting sound of her alarm clock. She crawls out of her bed like a 1000 year old tortoise and she slowly stretches her limbs.

A plastic carpet decorated with little paint brushes and drops of color is guiding her to the spaceship's art gallery. The artificial light is a bit too harsh and white for the sunlight that it is supposed to imitate. The walls are painted with a scenic Martian landscape. She makes a cup of tea. The Commander's eyes wander through the paintings exposed on the plastic walls. It’s a gallery of all different kinds of waves. Radiowaves, gravitational waves, light waves but also material waves like water waves. Waves are a disturbance traveling through a medium. Like she is.

She enjoys to look at art while drinking her tea. She likes to let her mind wander while being locked in this metallic box. She passes the sculpture garden with the sculptures of the four first female astronauts stepping on Mars. They are dressed in their original blue suits, like a martial troop of Renaissance Virgin Marys. The lines of their faces are modified, like iconic, pre-historic goddesses. Sometimes she has to think of prehistoric women hunting for mammoths.

She goes straight to the observation deck. She moves the windows towards the core of the Milky Way, where a gigantic black hole is hidden behind a huge cloud of gas. She sits down on her command chair and sips on the tea. The DMT is kicking in. The Stars begin to vibrate and dance around before her eyes. She feels a rush of excitement running up her spine. Will she talk to me today?

Text by Marianne Vlaschits

The exhibtion is curated by Karim Crippa.

Marianne Vlaschits and DUVE Berlin wish to express their grattitude for the Austrian Federal Chancellery's generous support.