Manja McCade

19/09/2026

Archives are dangerous things. They make it much harder to rewrite what happened.. ✊ (Picture shows a gift by Davide Dormino for the Archiv) Thank you Davide...

17/09/2026

Julian is officially back on X 🥰

15/09/2026

https://assangearchives.substack.com/p/we-will-not-ask-permission-to-remember?r=4babna&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Why the Julian Assange Archive will remain independent of government funding — and why...

18/07/2026

I have never understood the desire to make art harmless.
Beauty has an extraordinary ability to invite us closer. It persuades us to stop, to look a little longer and to spend time with something we might otherwise have walked past. I value that deeply. Beauty is not the enemy. What I struggle to understand is the expectation that beauty should also soften whatever the work is trying to say.
Not everything I create is political, just as not everything I create is intended to challenge the world around us. Some projects are deeply personal, while others grow from a fascination with a material, a place or a question that refuses to leave me alone. I have never felt any obligation to express an idea through one particular medium. If a question demands a painting, I paint. If it requires an installation, I build one.
I've never been interested in making work that tells people what they should think. Far more interesting to me is the moment when certainty begins to crack, when a familiar story suddenly becomes less comfortable than it was a few minutes before. Art doesn't need to provide answers, but I do believe it should remain honest enough not to hide difficult questions behind beautiful surfaces.
Most of what I create begins with curiosity rather than certainty. Questions about memory, power, silence and responsibility have followed me for years. Sometimes they lead me towards a canvas. Sometimes they become an installation. The form changes, but the questions rarely do.
Perhaps that's why I've never understood the desire to make art harmless. If a piece of work leaves us exactly where it found us, I can't help wondering what it was really trying to do in the first place.
🗣️ What do you think art should never become?
W

17/07/2026

I sometimes wonder what another artist would think if we swapped studios for a day.

Would they recognise what matters and what doesn't? Would they know why an old coffee tin has survived three moves while something expensive disappeared years ago? Or why a brush that has long since stopped behaving exactly as it should is still sitting in the same place, waiting to be picked up again?

Studios have a habit of collecting things that no longer make sense to anyone except the person working in them. Mine is full of objects that would probably look like clutter to someone else, but I don't really see clutter when I look at them. I see solutions. I see memories. I see little accidents that became part of the way I work.

I've never believed that creativity comes from buying the newest materials or building the perfect workspace. Most of the things I use every day have simply stayed because they still have something left to give.

Perhaps that's why my studio has never felt like a room full of equipment.

It feels more like a conversation that's been going on for years.

🗣️ Is there an object in your workspace that nobody else would understand, but you couldn't imagine working without?

15/07/2026

Inspiration is a romantic lie.

At least, it always has been for me.

People often think that artists need to travel to breathtaking landscapes or sit in picturesque cafés to find something worth painting. For me, that's never been where honest art begins.

Beautiful places rarely make me want to pick up a brush. They invite admiration, but not necessarily reflection.

The things that pull me towards a canvas are usually found in the friction of everyday life. A stain on a concrete wall. The heavy silence in a room after a long conversation. The way winter light quietly settles into the corner of a studio. Those are the moments that stay with me.

I don't look for beauty. I look for resonance.

I'm interested in the moments where reality cracks open just enough to reveal the emotion underneath. Those fleeting seconds when something suddenly feels impossible to ignore.

As a witness, my job isn't to polish the world. It's to capture it as it feels.

🗣️ Where do you feel most connected to your own thoughts? In the noise of new places, or in the quiet details of everyday life?

09/07/2026

Die selektive Solidarität der neuen Meinungsfreiheits-Kämpfer

In den letzten Tagen formiert sich in der deutschen Medienszene ein lautstarker Protest. Nachdem der Podcast von Ben Berndt ({ungeskriptet}) wegen seines Interviews mit Björn Höcke unter den Druck der Medienaufsicht geraten ist, entdecken unzählige Kommentatoren plötzlich ihre Leidenschaft für die Meinungsfreiheit.

Neben Ben selbst, der die Situation direkt zur existenziellen Zäsur erklärt, fühlen sich nun auch namhafte Medienanwälte auf den Plan gerufen, um medienwirksam in den Ring zu steigen.
Versteht mich nicht falsch: Ich mag Ben und schätze seine Arbeit grundsätzlich sehr. Und das Recht auf freie Meinungsäußerung verdient Verteidigung. Jedes einzelne Mal. Ausnahmslos. Die Ironie dieser plötzlichen Mobilisierung von außen betrachtet ist unerträglich.

In über mehr als 300 Episoden hinweg wurde der Fall von Julian – der wohl wichtigste Fall für die Pressefreiheit in unserer Generation – in diesen deutschen Erfolgsformaten totgeschwiegen.

Nicht ein einziges Mal wurde dort ernsthaft debattiert, was es bedeutet, wenn investigativer Journalismus kriminalisiert wird. Julian existierte in dieser glatten Podcast-Welt schlicht nicht. Er war wohl zu unbequem, zu riskant, zu weit weg vom eigenen Kosmos.

Jetzt, da das eigene Studio, die eigene Reichweite und das eigene Geschäftsmodell bedroht sind, wollen plötzlich alle als Gladiatoren für das freie Wort in die Arena ziehen.Das ist kein echter Aktivismus. Das ist ein billiges Schauspiel.

Die Freiheit des Wortes nur dann zu verteidigen, wenn das eigene Mikrofon bedroht ist, hat nichts mit Überzeugung zu tun. Das ist reine Bequemlichkeit. Wer jahrelang vor Gefängnissen stand, Mahnwachen organisierte und den Mund aufmachte, als es unpopulär war, tat dies nicht aus Eigennutz.

Echte Werte zeigen sich darin, dass man auch dann für sie einsteht, wenn man selbst keinen Vorteil davon hat.

Julian ist heute frei. Das ist ein historischer Grund zur Freude. Aber dieser Fall ist noch lange nicht zu Ende. Dass die US-Justiz Julian diesen Deal aufgezwungen hat – dass er sich formell des „Spionageverdachts“ schuldig bekennen musste, nur um nach jahrelanger Haft endlich seine Freiheit und sein Leben zurückzubekommen , ist das eigentlich Brandgefährliche.

Man hat ihn in eine Ecke gedrängt, aus der es keinen anderen Ausweg gab. Dadurch haben sie einen fatalen Präzedenzfall geschaffen, um journalistische Recherchearbeit zu kriminalisieren. Julian hat diesen unschätzbaren Preis für uns alle bezahlt.

Sein Schicksal bleibt der globale Maßstab dafür, wie skrupellos Regierungen mit der Wahrheit umgehen.

Wer eine ernsthafte Debatte über Pressefreiheit führen will, kann diese fortlaufende Bewährungsprobe nicht einfach ignorieren. Wer das tut, verteidigt nicht die Meinungsfreiheit. Der verteidigt nur sich selbst!

16/05/2026

People often ask me why I care so much about materials when it comes to painting.

Why I work with old linen whenever possible.
Why I spend time searching for fabrics with history instead of just ordering endless blank canvases online.
Why pigments matter to me so much.
Why I care about how a surface is built before the painting even begins.

And honestly, because materials carry something.

History of course. Texture. Human touch. Time.

But yes, for me there is also something spiritual in it.

Not in a performative “look at me being mystical” kind of way. More quiet than that. More instinctive.

A piece of handwoven linen from the early 1900s already existed long before me. Someone touched it, used it, lived around it. The fibres softened over decades. The structure became uneven. Human.

And when I sit there grounding these surfaces by hand, layer after layer, while the old linen texture still pushes back through the gesso, it genuinely feels almost meditative to me.

Like working with something that already carries memory inside it.

The same with pigments.

Whether I work with handmade colours based on old recipes or with really high quality professional oil paints made with actual rich pigment loads, I want colour to feel alive. Deep. Physical. Honest.

Cheap paint often sits dead on a surface.

Real pigment moves. Breathes. Changes with light. Ages with dignity.

That matters to me because I never wanted my paintings to feel overproduced or disconnected from the human hand.

I want them to carry traces of process, tension, instinct and material truth.

Because painting, at least for me, is never just about creating an image.

It’s also about what energy remains inside the object afterwards.

∞

13/05/2026

I’ve been spending the last weeks preparing a whole series of very small canvases made from handwoven antique linen from the early 1900s mounted onto black bookbinder’s board.

And I swear there is something almost meditative about grounding these little things three times with a tiny brush and the old linen structure still keeps pushing its way back through the surface again.

That texture refuses to disappear.
Which honestly makes me love them even more.

I didn’t expect these tiny formats to pull me in like this but they really do. They feel quiet and intense at the same time somehow.

Like small pieces carrying a lot more weight than they should.

Still deep in the process over here. More soon :-)

∞

08/05/2026

MASKBALL
Oil on linen
150 × 180 cm
2024

This one was built through tension.

Adding, destroying, covering things up, pulling them back out again. Some parts almost fought against each other while painting.

For me, “Maskball” is about the masks people wear to move through the world — socially, emotionally, politically. The performance. The pressure. The survival instinct inside modern life.

I left the drips, the fractures, the roughness in place on purpose.

I don’t want paintings that behave too well.

Original:
https://www.manjamccade.com/store/p/maskball

fine art prints on request