Ari Merten CV, Email
Ari Merten (*1987, GDR) is an intermedia artist and educator based in Berlin. Their practice revolves around music, exploring personal history, identity, and collective experience.


Selected Work:


Concert Love Songs for a new Future 2021
Video
Sketches for a new Love Song 2021

Music/ Video
Cake/ Bel Air 2020

Performance
Peeling Fruit in front of Strangers  
2020

PerformanceNudes 
2019

Installation
Clitorian Reading Room2019

Visuals
Bodies of Discourse2017

Performance
 What’s Good?2017

Meisterschüler Project
Heroes (Rework)2015

Diploma Exhibition
Poptraumatic2012

InstallationClitorian Reading Room
2019

In collaboration with artist Thea Reifler & more

Clitorian Reading Room is an installation created for the attic of the Rüschhaus, located just a few kilometers outside Münster. The romantic country house served for more than twenty years as the summer residence of the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, where she wrote many of her most important works.

Blending historical references, speculative fiction, and feminist thought, the work imagines Droste-Hülshoff as an early visionary of a “Clitorian Age” — a cultural paradigm centered on sensation, complexity, and embodied knowledge beyond binary understandings of gender and anatomy.

The installation presents fragments of a fictional archive, including relics from Droste-Hülshoff’s imagined clitorian collection and excerpts from secret correspondences, alongside contemporary objects and performances. At its center is a reinterpretation of the legendary Clitorian Reading Room — a space dedicated to experimental forms of reading, writing, and sensing.







Concept & Realization: Ari Merten & Thea Reifler
Chairs: Bound by Ceca
Performers (Audio) : Ethan Folk and Paula Hans
Photos: Sabrina Richmann
Special Thanks: Jörg Albrecht and our collaborators
Year: 2019

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