Maria Stamenković Herranz
The Painted Heron
performance DateS
Week 3 July 27 - August 3, 2025
The Painted Heron is a long durational road journey film performance conceived by Maria Stamenković Herranz. The performance piece captures through film the daily progression of a journey from East to West - starting in Novi Sad, Serbia, and ending in Kleve, Germany. Combining walking and train travel, the journey unfolds through a mix of mapped routes and improvised decisions. Throughout the trip, the performer carries a living sunflower on her back. After seven days, the sunflower will be replanted in a field behind the castle at Museum Schloss Moyland. Rather than following a traditional narrative structure, the journey is captured in daily segments, later assembled into a continuous video that preserves the rawness of each clip. The film will loop throughout the day in the museum space, inviting viewers to experience the rhythm and reality of the journey. It functions both as documentation and as an extension of the performance itself. Conceived in dialogue with the legacy of Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramović, The Painted Heron reflects on the lasting impact of their artistic, ecological and political engagement. It also addresses Beuys' ecological philosophies, his work Eurasia and his visit to the Belgrade SKC in 1974. The sunflower exposed to shifting weather, borders, and encounters embodies both fragility and endurance. Known for absorbing toxins from damaged soil, it symbolizes resilience and healing. Its movement across territories raises questions of land, belonging, and ecological care. The performance route, shaped by histories of war and fragmentation, reflects on personal and collective memories. Arriving at Schloss Moyland - a site marked by WWII trauma - the replanting becomes a gesture of regeneration. Influenced by the agricultural practice of barbecho (fallow), The Painted Heron embraces stillness, suggesting transformation through care, pause, and attention.

TAVROS

Virginia Mastrogiannaki examined the latter years of Joseph Beuys’s life and oeuvre, during which his expressive language became increasingly politically charged. She explored the profound impact of the universalist and humanist ideas of Anacharsis Cloots on Beuys’s artistic and ideological framework, as well as Beuys’s spiritual affinity with the Enlightenment thinker known as the “Orator of Mankind.”

Anacharsis Cloots, a Prussian-born aristocrat and radical figure of the French Revolution, was perhaps the first to advocate a universal parliament, envisioned a world united under a universal republic, devoid of national borders and ruled by the ideals of human reason and equality. These ideas deeply resonated with Joseph Beuys, whose notion of Soziale Plastik was based on the belief that art and life are inseparable, and that every individual has the creative ability to transform society.

Beuys saw in Cloots a kindred spirit — someone who represented the fusion of philosophical idealism and political engagement. Beuys’s identification with Cloots was so strong that he would refer to himself as, “Josephanacharsis Clootsbeuys,” as a symbolic merging of their identities.

In 1983, Beuys performed at Schloss Gnadenthal, the former residence of Cloots in the Rhineland. There, he read aloud from Cloots’s biography in an “aktion” that functioned as both homage and political invocation. This performance demonstrated Beuys’s aim to rejuvenate Enlightenment principles in a modern, post-war European setting and to establish the artist as a catalyst for political transformation.

During the monthly residency at Artoll, Mastrogiannaki conducted extensive in-situ research. In addition to studying the archives and collection of Schloss Moyland, she also consulted the municipal archives of Kleve, explored Anacharsis Cloots’ letters and political speeches, some of which are displayed in the exhibition. She engaged in discussions with the Koekkoek Museum and visited Schloss Gnadenthal, the residence of Anacharsis Cloots in Kleve.

In her performance project TAVROS, Virginia Mastrogiannaki focuses on Beuys’s candidacy for the European Parliament in 1979, which reflected his vision  of  merging  artistic  practice  and  democratic  action. Mastrogiannaki examines the institutional texts that form the legal and political basis of the European Union today. Drawing on Beuys’s legacy, she studies the legal and political foundations of the European Union by engaging with the official Treaties that form its institutional framework.

Linguistic issues have long been a central focus of her artistic research. For TAVROS, the impact of language plays a central role. She is drawn to the multilingual and internationalist nature of the European Community, both as a political construct and a symbolic space.

In TAVROS, Mastrogiannaki removes all economic jargon from the institutional texts governing the European Union. While analyzing the Treaties that regulate the Union, she contemplates the elements that define our contemporary European identity.

The title TAVROS (Bull) refers to the transformation of Zeus, the second main figure in the myth of Europa’s abduction — a myth from which the European continent and, later, the European Union derive their name.

Virginia Mastrogiannaki, 2025

Travel Route

Daily documentation
Filmed by Nadja Stanišić

Day One
27 July 2025
Fruška gora, Serbia

Day Two
28 July 2025
Novi sad, Serbia -
Ilok, Croatia

Day 3
29 July 2025
Ilok - VUKOVAR - Varaždin, Croatia

Day 4
30 July 2025
Varaždin, Croatia - Maribor, slovenia

Day 5
31 July 2025
Maribor, slovenia -
Graz, Austria

Day 6
1 August 2025
Graz, Austria -
Nuremberg, Germany

Day 7
2 August 2025
Nuremberg -
Düsseldorf, Germany

about the artist
Maria Stamenković Herranz is an interdisciplinary artist whose work merges performance, visual art, and embodied research. She investigates how ephemeral actions leave lasting traces in matter and collective memory, positioning performance as a tool for social transformation and a bridge between history, politics, and spirituality. Through sculptural objects like bricks in This Mortal House Building 1 & 2, she challenges the boundary between action and object, encouraging active audience engagement with the evolving narrative. Her projects have been exhibited internationally at museums, theatres, and biennials, including the Benaki Museum (Athens, 2016), Sakip Sabanci Museum (Istanbul, 2020), Bangkok Art Biennale (Bangkok, 2021), March Art Project Gallery (Istanbul, 2022), Paris Photo (Paris, 2023), and Librairie du Palais Gallery during the Arles Photo Festival (Arles, 2024)
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