Vika Kirchenbauer

Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. In her work she examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within societal power structures. Often relating personal and collective memory/non-remembrance to the politics of spectatorship, Kirchenbauer’s work continuously negotiates the role of affects in the field of contemporary art and questions the ways in which marginalized bodies become experienceable in exhibition spaces.

Most recently, comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kirchenbauer’s work have been presented at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2021); and at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna (2021). Her videos and installations have been exhibited
in numerous group shows and screenings at, among others, the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan (2021); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019); the Berlin International Film Festival (2020), the New York Film Festival (2021, ‘20) and the Toronto International Film Festival (2021). For her work UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS (2020), Vika Kirchenbauer received the EMAF Award, the German Short Film Award and the German Film Critics Award. In 2016, her video work SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR was awarded the Prize for the Best Contribution to the German Competition at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Other awards include the Kunstfonds Stipend (2020), the Villa Aurora Los Angeles Fellowship (2018), and the Visual Arts Working Stipend of the Berlin Senate (2015).

She has been invited for talks, workshops, seminars and tutorials at institutions such as the New York University, the Goldsmiths University of London, the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles; the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford; the Rutgers University, New Brunswick; the University of Copenhagen, the Berlin University of the Arts and the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Since 2022 she is Professor of Fine Art / Foundation Class ‘Film/Video’ at the Braunschweig University of Art.

Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist and writer currently working and residing in Berlin. In her work she explores opacity in relation to representation of the "othered" through ostensibly contradictory methods like exaggerated explicitness, oversharing and perversions of participatory culture.

She examines the troublesome nature of "looking" and "being looked at" in larger contexts including labour within post-fordism and the experience economy, modern drone warfare and its insistence on unilateral staring, the power relationships of psychiatry, performer/spectator relations, participatory culture, contemporary art display and queer representational politics as well as the everyday life experience of ambiguously gendered individuals.

Her work has been exhibited in a wide range of contexts in about forty countries and has won prizes at festivals in the United States, South Korea, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Norway, Slovakia, Poland, Bosnia and Italy.

Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and music producer. Her work has received wide-ranging international attention. Her films and installations have, for instance, been exhibited in group shows and screenings at, among others, the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan (2021); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019); the Berlin International Film Festival (2020), the New York Film Festival (2020), the ICA Artists’ Film Biennial, London (2016), and the Videonale at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2013, ‘15, ‘17). Most recently, Vika Kirchenbauer received the EMAF Award, the German Short Film Award, and the German Film Critics Award for her work UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS (2020). In 2016, her video work SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR was awarded the Best Contribution to the German Competition at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Other awards include the Kunstfonds Stipend (2020), the Villa Aurora Los Angeles Fellowship (2018), and the Visual Arts Working Stipend of the Berlin Senate (2015).