Valentin Manz

ISEA Bio(s) Available:

• ISEA2013

  Christine Cynn & Valentin Manz have collaborated on numerous interactive installations incorporating audience participation, large-scale sculptural environments and multichannel video installations (earthNOWbeing 2011; Bread Head with Campbell Works 2011-present). Christine Cynn has been developing new ways to catalyse and document the human imagination in order to illuminate the conflicts of desire, fear, and hope that shape our lives and our world.  She is co-director and co-producer of the award-winning documentary The Act of Killing (2012) with Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, with executive producers Werner Herzog & Errol Morris, recipient of the Panorama Audience Award, Berlin International Film Festival 2013; Danish Film Academy Award for Best Documentary; Copenhagen DOX:AWARD 2012; Movies That Matter Human Rights Award 2013). Cynn studied film with Dusan Makavejev and Chantal Akerman at Harvard University. Valentin Manz’s work engages viewers visually and physically in a sculptural theatre made from glass, metal, clay, and found materials such as cardboard and furniture. Manz has been a fellow at Urban Glass in Brooklyn (2005) and the Creative Glass Center of America (2007 & 2013), and shown his work in London, Munich, and New York. He studied stage design at the Slade and Central St. Martin’s College of Art, and graduated from Goldsmiths as an art psychotherapist. Christine and Valentin are both based in the UK.
  Possessing both a doctorate in psychology and an accomplished ability in the pugilistic arts, Michaela Davies can perform a complete emotional dissection while delivering a near-lethal series of devastating blows. When she’s not busy reducing people to physical and emotional pulp, Michaela unwinds by creating performances which involve subjecting participants to extreme feats of endurance and public electro-convulsion, along with other less ethical preoccupations. Her work has received support from a number of august art and science institutions and festival organizers that were all simply too frightened to say no. Also an unrelenting force on the bass guitar, her path is littered with countless musicians who have been bludgeoned into submission by her treacherous headstock or coruscating remarks.

Last Known Location:

• United Kingdom