Few artists have constructed worlds as singular, cohesive, and quietly radical as those of Mark Manders. For more than three decades, he has been adding to what he calls his “self-portrait as a building”—not a metaphor, but a monumental, ever-expanding structure composed of sculpture, language, and thought. Suspended in a state of permanent becoming, unmoored from any specific time or place, every new installation/sculpture generates another room in this hypothetical building, each iteration more often than not appearing as an abandoned ruin populated with fragmented bodies, furnishings, and objects.
Language as material is central to Manders’s practice, another source of fragments that he can mine and re-arrange into alternate worlds that imply yet resist meaning, further complicating the boundary between reality and invention. Fabricated newspapers and archives, invented histories, and false encyclopedic entries circulate convincingly within real cultural systems, exposing the fragile mechanics through which knowledge is produced, accepted, and eventually undone. In Manders’s hands, fiction and myth (both personal and universal) act as a sculptural force, capable of entering the world and changing it, while sculpture becomes a form of three-dimensional fiction—a book, simultaneously invented and real, that we can enter with the body as well as the mind.
Rajesh Punj: What do you mean by calling your work a “self-portrait as a building?”
Mark Manders: I’m a sculptor, but when I started, my goal was to become a writer. I was very interested in books written in the first person; if you had a book that you could think along with, you could look into someone’s mind. So, I decided to write in the first person. I was only 18 years old, and I had never seriously thought about becoming an artist, so I did something that was perhaps strange, yet also logical. . .
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