Press release

Maix Mayer is a conceptual artist as well as doing installation, in his work occurs numerous of interdisciplinary conjunctions of media-theoretical and practical ideas.
He analyzes in his works the constellations and composition by diverse narrative types of fiction and reality. The interrelation between art and architecture is used as consistently readjusted matrix.
In his installation „Hanoi" presented 2004 in Berlin, Maix Mayer is connecting film, video, photography, sound, sculpture and architecture. The piece consists of a series of C-Prints/Stills of a fictional film, for which the non-realization forms the conceptual basis of. The plot is located in a city founded of an ideal. The film stills become key frames, statically storytellers in contrast to the animated image.
Unlike his current installation "canyon", which is telling about real existent architecture and spaces in different locations. Through the cinematic homogenization of different functional places sort of a utopian ideal city is arising only as filmic reality. The supernumeraries of the film acquire in a per formative manner the precisely chosen architecture and become negotiators of an outer landscape into an inner (soul-) scenery.

The work consists firstly of a ninety minute film loop* and secondary of photo puzzles which construct a fictional making off out of a combination from film still and quotes and can be (re) constructed cooperatively.
*"Repetition and memory are the same movement, just in opposed directions. That what you remember has happened and will be repeated backwards, whereas the actual repetition is a memory forward."
(Sören Kierkegaard, Repetition)
After his diploma in marine biology in Rostock, Maix Mayer studied photography at the Hochschule fuer Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB)/ Leipzig. He finished his studies with a diploma in painting/graphics and is working since 2005 as a visiting professor for media at the HGB.
Real and imaginary journeys, remembrance and memory and their new construction are an analogical process of adoption, which can be repeated individually by the visitors. Through this active and subjective retranslation is the visitor regaining the control of his own images and stories.