With What do we want that seduces us and The Anecdote, GAK presents the first institutional solo exhibitions by Mara Wohnhaas (b. 1997, based in Düsseldorf). Wohnhaas’s work investigates mechanisms of thought, language, perception, and spatial structures, taking up their internal logics and contradictions and stretching, destabilizing, or pushing them to the point of absurdity. An event or a brief performative moment often serves as the point of departure for her sculptures, performances, drawings, photographs, and videos. Language plays a central role in her practice as well: it generates expectations, promises proximity, and at the same time operates as a slippery system of distance and abstraction.
In What do we want that seduces us, two reconstructions of an illusory stage face one another. Wohnhaas approaches these sculptures with meticulous precision, reproducing details such as the fabric of the stage backdrop and the wood veneer with exacting precision, leaving only the exterior sides and their respective surfaces visible. The magic trick itself remains both present and absent—as a latent possibility of something that may have already taken place or might still occur. Moving between minimal sculpture and stage set, technical logic and illusion, What do we want that seduces us raises questions about what we see, what we believe, and what we want to know.
The Anecdote unfolds as a more intimate space in which Wohnhaas engages questions of value and the production of meaning. Strategies that aim to establish clarity or certainty reveal themselves as unstable projections. Bringing together snapshots and signlike traces of events, The Anecdote deliberately withholds the punch line typically associated with the anecdotal form. Instead, the exhibition hovers between logic and chance, truthfulness and ambiguity.
Out of seemingly coherent connections, Wohnhaas’s works generate relationships in which the circulation and relativity of knowledge, reason, truth, and appearance collaborate in a seductive and often humorous way. They reflect desires projected onto them and translate those impulses into form and material. While the objects in What do we want that seduces us are clearly and geometrically defined, with their inner workings concealed, The Anecdote allows the subjective gaze to enter the picture plane as an interface between interior and exterior life, blurring its boundaries. This suspension of the conceptual divide—between psychology and empiricism, the invisible and the visible, imagination and fact—extends beyond artistic practice to our relationship with the world around us, and to the modes of communication and media through which that relationship is shaped.
Mara Wohnhaas graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2025. In 2021, she received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation in Bonn. In 2014 and 2015, Mara Wohnhaas was a scholarship holder at the Masterclass at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. Her works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions, including n.b.k./Uferstudios, Berlin (2024); HAMLET, Zurich (2023); KunstXaus, Zurich, (2023); MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (2023); CAPC, Bordeaux (2022); BQ, Berlin (2021).
Opening: 30.01., 19:00
Supported by
Der Senator für Kultur der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, Waldemar Koch Stiftung, OLB Stiftung