Mark Barker: Artist Talk, 11 December 2024

11. 12. 2024 from 7 pm
UMPRUM Technology Centre, Mikulandská 134/5, Prague 1, 3rd floor, auditorium

Mark Barker, a British artist living in Berlin, will speak about his work at UMPRUM.

Mark Barker’s oeuvre speaks of bodies, how they move and how things move in and out of them. Barker makes use of a wide variety of affective and conceptual approaches as part of a personal exploration of the human condition, understood here as a constant negotiation between order and disorder, slippage and containment.

Barker’s artistic language is rooted in an archive and vocabulary of materials and gestures that have historically been considered ‘minor’, neglected, or abject. Everywhere, through the brokenness and decay of the animate and inanimate – by way of leaks, spills, stains, cracks, smudges, bodily waste and fluids – Barker proposes a worldview that embraces the body as porous and messy, and therefore potentially limitless. He explores how the body – socially, discursively, sexually – is produced in space and, in turn, how the body might re-inscribe itself onto its environment – and the traces that such reciprocal transformations produce, both within the body and within architecture. 

Mark Barker (b. 1983) is a British, Berlin-based artist. Recent exhibitions include: Are you more, Between Bridges, Berlin, 2024 and Zürich Biennale, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2023.

—

The event is organized by the Department of Fine Arts of AAAD in Prague and takes place in connection with the exhibition Mark Barker, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Zuzana Šrámková, Alice Hattrick (text) at the Cursor Gallery – Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, 13 December 2024 – 16 February 2025.