Mario Asef

Mario Asef
Cenit, Mario Asef © 2016-17
video, 11min, color, stereo digital

March, 2018

Griffin Art Projects is excited to welcome Berlin based artist Mario Asef for a brief stay in our Artist Residence. Mario Asef’s artistic works develop—as he himself states—out of “the illusory construction of social reality.” His works are divided into three thematic categories: the realm of public space, the construction of which is language-based, the realm of history and writing about history as mediated reality construct, and the realm of scientific methods. His photographs, diagrams, videos, texts, and interventions in public space all deal with the legibility of normative orders that extend beyond purely grammatical micro-urban codes and which simultaneously integrate utopian and ideology-critical gestures. Mario Asef uses these normative orders to develop a methodology that combines causality with happenstance, pushing things into absurdity.

Asef studied architecture and art in Argentina, Germany, and England. His work has been exhibited worldwide, most recently at Unater (Puebla, Mexico), Quartier 21 (Vienna), Wild Palms (Düsseldorf), Junge Kunst e.V. (Wolfsburg, Germany), Kasa Galerie (Istanbul), SSamzie Space (Seoul), Nouvel Organon (Paris), Rich Mix (London), The Drawing Hub (Berlin). Recent museum exhibitions include Hamburger Kunsthalle, Villa Merkel, Kunstlerhaus Bregenz (Austria), and the Akademie der Künste Berlin. His videos, photographs, sound installations, and interventions in public space deal with architectonic as well as sociopolitical questions and confront issues related to their spatial representability.