mahony is a group of artists consisting of three or, as the case may be, four members, who have worked together since 2002. Meanwhile Jenny Wolka, Clemens Leuschner, Andreas Duscha, and Stephan Kobatsch have firmly established their reputation as adventurers, puzzle freaks, and mythologists.

The highlights of their artistic interventions include projects like the Happy End Machine (2003), a mobile movie screen for slushy film endings; the installation U5, which was searching for a never-built subway line in basements in Vienna; performances staged in London and entitled Strategy of Action, for which the library and the kitchen furnishings of the Austrian Cultural Forum were dislocated over night; and the undertaking of camping in a picture by Caspar David Friedrich. Comprehensive material collections were compiled for all of these works, and there is hardly an archival exhibition that can dispense with mahony. The quartet sees art production as a process during which a work is developed and realized collectively. The media and materials employed depend on the particular subject of a work and thus differ from case to case, adding up to a multifaceted spectrum. Communication among colleagues is considered important and leads to ever-new collaborations.

The endeavor Odyssee 500 was a project the group was preoccupied with in 2008/9 and which looked into traveling as a cultural practice. While on the road, mahony held a number of exhibitions, for instance on a London cargo ship. The group members also applied for artist residencies in Buenos Aires and on the Mexican peninsula of Yucatán; they were looking for the “ends of the world,” giving lectures, and compiling traveling reports. In various places, mahony staged temporary outdoor installations, such as on the world’s only natural asphalt lake on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, where viscous natural asphalt pours out of a crater from the bowels of the Earth. The lake sucks in the things floating on its surface, causing them to disappear. Several sculptures created by mahony were slowly sinking into the liquid bitumen’s impenetrable blackness. Kleines Schwarzes #13, #17, and #19 are three reproductions of such sunken objects, yet rendered – how could it be any different with mahony – in amusing miniature formats. Small, delicate, and elegant, they charm away associations with the deathly brew and would also make a favorable impression in a court jeweler’s window.

Brigitte Huck, 2011 (translation: Wolfgang Astelbauer)