Fieldnotes

The perceived inability to protect and hold on to something escalates into a compulsion, a grip so tight that it breaks everything. Exposure, admission of one's own weakness, and the impossibility of perceived and unavoidable suffering turn into endless horror, relentless shame, disgrace, humiliation, trauma, and the traumatisation of others.

With Fieldnotes, Norman Maýn makes this fragility and discrepancy between our inner and outer selves tangible. We all have our own and collective fields and wander around in them with our notebooks, trying to find our bearings. As our lives progress, negative experiences, events and feelings dig deep into the dry ground, leaving visible, deeply engraved symbols and inscriptions on these memory boards.

Above all, however, for my Maýn – in addition to our own experiences, traumas and mistakes – these writings and symbols also contain those of our caregivers, ancestors, society and humanity as a whole. Everything around us can be a mirror of these individual or collective memories. For me, nature and its creatures, from which we once turned away and decided to subjugate them instead of listening to their voices, also symbolise these memories. Listening to their supposed silence carries both the whispering, calming and confident voice, but also a primal force, that of suffering and hardship that we experience during our lives. We all have our own and collective fields and wander incessantly in them: fields full of memories, abundance, fertility, drought... Love and loss, battlefields... Fieldnotes provides an insight into the many paths and sections through Maýn's personal and symbolic fields of memory for the duration of this exhibition, allowing us to wander, search, but also empathise, sympathise and find.

In this first solo exhibition by Norman Maýn, who was born and raised in Berlin, we experience an intense installation that provides insight into the diversity of the media he combines, such as painting, photography, objects and sound. In addition to this diversity of media, the exhibition includes works created within the past year and this year in Maýn's primary working environments: Germany (Berlin and Lower Lusatia) and Spain (mainly Andalusia).

Norman Maýn was born and raised in Berlin. He studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he already attracted attention in 2024 with his thesis ‘Ghosts,’ a complex installation about the surreal existence of mistreated and abused Spanish hunting dogs. He currently works in Germany (Berlin/Lausitz) and Spain (mainly Andalusia), combining almost all media such as photography, painting, video, text, fragments and objects and transforming them into intense, memorable installations that form comprehensive cycles of work.

• Opening: 13 June 2025, 6–9 p.m.
  
• Performance: 13 June 2025, 7 p.m. by Angelika Puff
  
• Exhibition: 14 June – 12 July 2025
  

Galerie Met, Mariannenstrasse 33, 10999 Berlin
Tue–Sat 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.