Mahony

According to Confucius, the path is the goal. For Mahony, it’s the detours that lead to the story. Founded in Vienna by Stephan Kobatsch, Clemens Leuschner and Jenny Wolka, the trio has been active since 2002. Although they will soon all be living in Berlin, moving there after a residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, this proximity is not the norm – Wolka has spent several years in Mexico and South America. Rather than impairing the group’s work, this separation inspired it, leading to intense if not always seamless discussions across the Atlantic.

Alluding to the Bermuda Triangle – where many boats and planes have allegedly vanished without a trace – the artists refer to their former situation, working between Vienna, Buenos Aires and Mexico, as the ‘Mahony Triangle’. The trio’s work also repeatedly deals with disappearance, failures of communication, logistics and the mis­understandings of transatlantic exchange. A good example of this is their work entitled Operación Pavo (Operation Turkey, 2011) shown at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City in 2011. The title of the work quotes a piece in Austria’s daily newspaper Neue Kronen Zeitung on the negotiations for a temporary return of an important Aztec cultural arte­fact held by Vienna’s ethnological museum: Montezuma’s famous feather crown. Operation Turkey proved to be a canard, however, much to the disappointment of the Mexicans. Appearing in the guise of cultural ambassadors for Austria, Mahony exhibited an original Tyrolean hat with a pheasant feather – part placeholder, part gift from a guest. Like Montezuma’s headdress in Vienna, the hat was mounted on the wall like a trophy. It was also accompanied by a booklet with press clippings from both sides of the Atlantic reporting on the failed return. However ‘exotic’ a Tyrolean hat in Mexico may appear at first glance, the work is about more than just an ironic take on post-colonial history. Instead, the hat without a head also stands for a fundamental problem of narration: the story is usually told in the past tense, the protagonist is no longer present, and the audience must trust the narrator who filters the account.

For Los Tres Invitados (The Three Invitees, 2011), Mahony commissioned Alex Castilla, an artist friend, to compose a song in the traditional Trova Yucateca style of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and to have it performed by a local guitar ensemble and videod. The three invitees referred to in the title are Mahony themselves, who for their multi­-media installation Find Find No Walk (2011) retraced the legendary Yucatan trip by Land art pioneer Robert Smithson. On his travels, Smithson laid out mirrors at various locations in the dust (Yucatan Mirror Displacements, 1969). For their trip, Mahony used the same guide book as Smithson, and they, too, made and documented a series of mirror works, such as Yucatán Folding M2 (2011). In addition, they made corresponding works using pages from the guide book. In the Trova song, the episode was condensed into a mysterious legend. Mahony’s interest lies in integrating different perspectives: Smithson’s, their own, those of their artist friend and of the local musicians.

Mahony include gaps and variables in their works from the outset. Although some paths lead nowhere, their method results in new approaches. The visitors to The Many Happenings (2013), an exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, had to walk through a floor mat of loose cork granules. Over time, the dark brown crumbs spread throughout the exhibition space and eventually the administration of Künstlerhaus Bethanien intervened and had the work removed. In response a video work appeared in the exhibition (Untitled, the action is over, 2013) showing documentary footage of the opening: the usual mingling and smalltalk bookending a section in the middle showing visitors dancing ecstatically and sliding over the floor. As here, the making of the work becomes an integral part of the final presentation – means, ends and detours melt into each other.

As a consequence, finding, searching and getting lost are recurring themes, as in the exhibition Kimm Sun Sinn (Horizon Sun Meaning, 2010), a series of photographs and videos documenting the artists’ journey by container ship from Hamburg via Brazil to Argentina – including an evening karaoke session with the ship’s crew (We Are The World, 2010). On this journey, they experienced first hand how viewpoints shift as one’s own location changes: as one old continent disappears, the perceptive apparatus trained there continually recalibrates to its unfamiliar surroundings.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell