The Brooklyn Rail

“I had almost a serious accident because the fire took all the air … and when you lose consciousness, performance is not happening.”

–Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 5 (1974) is a video documenting a performance in which she lost consciousness after smoke inhalation and is a highlight of curator/painter Mari Otberg’s sprawling exhibition of over forty-five artists at Kunsthaus Muerz. The video ends with the artist lying on the floor within a burning pentagram, whose five points align with her head, arms, and legs, feminizing and flattening Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490) into a horizontal, ritualized figure.

Allegedly, to die by fire is not unlike freezing to death, insofar as one shuts down first. The scope of this exhibition is numbing after a certain point, even comfortably so. Yet, Otberg’s curation resonates with dangerous themes that examine fire’s nihilistic lure and its ability to rekindle faith.

Milan Kunc’s sexually charged alpine lake scene, Declaration of Love (1977), contrasts a red-starred buxom woman with a pining man, both in uniform. Behind him, a giant explosion hints at his frantic desire, whilst her averted gaze does nothing to encourage it. Painted in his ironic “East Pop” style, Kunc taints propaganda with an ambiguous narrative, suggesting the lurid, manufactured romance we are observing was formed in the devil’s workshop. Set in a bucolic scene marred by smoldering lakeside fires, a tanked chalet, and sunken barbed-wire fences, their transactional connection is underscored by an actual chain that perforates the picture plane and undoubtedly the man’s heart. 

Throughout the exhibit, fire blends with narrative to direct us towards patriarchal violence. Another hyper-stylized painting, Transformation (2006) by Rosa Loy, a member of the New Leipzig School, also features a take on the romantic landscape. Set near a log cabin, mountains, and a stormy sky, in the foreground are two stylish yet anachronistic ladies in men’s clothes. The dominant one’s black-gloved hand is poised over the backside of her companion, who points out a book to another female couple across a fence. Surprisingly, this couple is contentedly bathing nude in a cauldron heated by roaring flames, which are blowing towards a ladder rising out of the picture’s sky. It seems that it is just a matter of time before the cabin goes up in smoke. Loy’s background in botany comes into play, but imagined in another century, and at the risk of condemnation and torture. Her bathers might simply be a mirage of sensual abandon, further symbolized by the orange flames that morph into branches and leaves. Loy’s picture having free rein with Daphne and Sappho. 

Elke Silvia Krystufek’s collage, THE RICH VISIT THE POOR THE POOR VISIT THE RICH (Jeff Koons) (2004) features a rogues’ gallery, interspersed with text that instructs viewers to not ask a white man to walk a mile in their moccasins. Elsewhere, Jeff Koons appears beside the slogan “REMEMBER, THERE’S NO BU$INE$$ LIKE SHOW BUSINESS.” The work is part of a series in which the artist contrasts social criticism and commercial success, dissecting power structures within the art world. A third passage takes a dark turn by referencing “Domestic Violence,” a show curated by Alison Jacques, which was a collective response to the murder of curator Rebeccah Blum by photographer Saul Fletcher. The art world always has its share of fires to extinguish. Christian Stock’s watercolors layer flame-like hues but, through the watery medium, evoke the opposite element; at the vernissage, he puckishly wore small, ear-attached fire sculptures, reminding us that fire is theft. 

Otberg’s wall of martyrs features nine women, each meticulously painted in a streamlined style, as an icon on a gold background. Among them, Anne Askew and Jeanne d’Arc were famously burned at the stake, their stories of martyrdom inseparable from the violence of fire. These works do not merely commemorate suffering; instead, they celebrate female strength and steadfastness in faith. The gold, traditionally used in iconography to evoke the divine and the transformative power of fire, connects these women to both spiritual transcendence and the flames that threatened them. Here, fire is not only a tool of persecution but also a symbol of resilience, sanctity, and the enduring power of the matrilineal sacred.

They Burn Witches Don’t They? is the title of artist/director Marieli Fröhlich’s film installation, featuring a life-size sculpture that—evoking Eastern European deer-goddess motifs—brings the cinematic rites into the viewer’s space. Onscreen, we watch a frenzied ritual unfolding against a wooded shoreline: the naked performer unshackles herself, cars explode and burst into flames, a Madonna weeps, and soldiers march across a battered body. Yet soon, aside from a shamanistic ritual, we see hunted deer drift through blazing light, while the hypnotic soundtrack’s rhythm propels sirens underwater where a running woman wields a trident. Dancing her way to liberation, she transforms fire’s purpose, reversing the symbol—harnessing animistic feminine and natural forces as a protective pagan forcefield, a call to action against retrograde currents with poetic profanity, or to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, for there to be art, there must be frenzy.

The Kunsthaus Muerz is a modern architectural embodiment of fire’s dual legacy of two historical buildings: a large chapel and an adjacent former blacksmith’s shop. The exhibition resonates with history; while the blacksmith’s hearth shaped molten iron into tools and weapons, the chapel forged faith through the fear of hellfire. In the main gallery/church, Thomas Baumann’s centrally installed Orwellian, all-seeing, three-dimensional eye sits halfway between Kunc’s battlefield and Abramović’s transformative space. Baumann’s video, a blinking orb visible from all sides, reflects a distant flame in its dark pupil. If fire marked humanity’s first technology, Baumann’s eye represents the surveillance powers that define the post-truth dark age and a frightening future. Its otherness lulls us into a false sense of freedom, making us more easily controlled and shaped by unseen forces, like fire consuming all in its path.