SHANGHAI.- Bluerider ART Shanghai·The Bund is presenting the 2025 solo exhibition of Swiss video-sculpture artist Marck, “Das Wasser”, opening on Saturday, November 1, 2025. As a pioneering figure of video sculpture, Marck places framing, the body, and the act of seeing at the core of his practice. By merging video and sculpture into a cross-media language, he creates a new artistic context of “dynamic sculpture.” This exhibition takes water as its central theme—both as a source of the spirit and an inner reflection, as well as a metaphor for flow, tension, and transformation. It invites viewers to participate and experience the interplay of the real and the virtual.
Marck (Switzerland, b.1964) is internationally recognized for his video sculptures. Based in Zurich, he is an atypical artist: he dropped out of art school, unable to accept rigid academic structures, and instead worked in fields as varied as auto dismantling, electrical engineering, rock music, and design for technological installations. These unconventional experiences shaped a distinctive artistic vocabulary—blending imagination, reality, and the playful ambiguity of perception. In 2019, he received the International Culture Award from the Accademia Culturale Internazionale Cartagine in Italy. His works have been exhibited at Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil and are held in major collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; ArtCenter Istanbul; and ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, as well as numerous private collections worldwide.
Exhibition Title “Das Wasser” bridges Eastern and Western conceptions of water. In Chinese philosophy resonates with Laozi’s “Highest good is like water”—a state of clarity, humility, and compassion: soft yet resilient, yielding yet all-encompassing. In Western thought, “Das Wasser” has long carried associations of becoming, flux, and perception. Heraclitus revealed the constant flow of existence through the river; Merleau-Ponty likened water to the fluidity of perception, accessible only through embodied experience; Bachelard called water “the most poetic element,” bearing dreams and imagination.
Marck’s works emerge from this confluence: water becomes not just a physical element, but a medium of presence, a catalyst of self-awareness, reflection, and emotional resonance—embodying beauty, freedom, vitality, as well as struggle and transformation.
Marck has stated: “The purpose of video is not to tell a story, but to evoke emotions in the viewer.” Inspired by Fluxus and pioneers of video art such as Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, he views video as a trigger of emotions rather than narrative. By combining filmed sequences with sculptural constructions, he dissolves the stillness of traditional sculpture, creating a new context of dynamic sculpture. Technology for him is only a tool, not an end. By designing cinematic scenes and merging them with handcrafted sculptural frames, he draws audiences into an experience of perception where the boundaries of real and virtual blur. As Swiss art historian Dr. Andres Pardey noted: “Interpreting Marck’s art becomes an interactive process, where the artist, the artwork, and the viewer all contribute.”
The exhibition features both iconic and new works centered around the theme of water.《Gegenstrom》—a female body moving underwater becomes a metaphor for survival, resistance, and entrapment. The slowed gestures amplify the fragility yet persistence of life. In his new work《Living in a Deep Square》, a woman floats within a confined grid, her restricted body symbolizing the multiple layers of social constraints imposed upon her; In《Long Tube》, a woman swims back and forth in a narrow passage, as if imprisoned. The voyeuristic perspective stirs a sense of unease, as though the viewer were seeking an outlet for the emotions of the woman—or perhaps their own. Together, the works construct a “philosophical theater of water”, intertwining video and sculpture into an immersive experience where viewers no longer remain passive, but engage as co-presences resonating with the work.
“Das Wasser” creates a comprehensive field where philosophy, society, and perception converge. Water here is at once material and metaphor, dream and social mirror. Through the interlacing of video and sculpture, Marck offers viewers a heightened sense of presence—an encounter of time, body, and vision that generates unique psychological resonance and aesthetic pleasure. Visitors are invited to relax, to listen to the whispers of water and to the inner soliloquy of their own existence, finding a poetic dwelling in the flow between image and form.
