Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. In her practice, she examines the fundamental political and social conflicts inherent in the artistic field. Through video, performance, installation, music production and theory writing, she engages critically with historically established categories that remain central to the ways in which art relates to class, coloniality and queerness. Core concerns of her practice are the affective and material infrastructures of contemporary art at the intersection of nation-state and economy, as well as the subjects and self-conceptions these produce. Her research has focused extensively on the early institutionalisation of contemporary art in 18th-century Britain, a setting in which moral philosophical concepts and artists’ feelings—most distinctly around compassion and inconvenience—played important parts in inserting imaginings of superiority and constellations of dominance into the core of European notions of art. Her first monograph was published by Mousse Publishing in 2022, and unites essays and works from the past ten years of her practice. A second monograph was released by the same publisher in 2025, combining her video work Compassion and Inconvenience (2024)—with its script reproduced alongside stills and descriptive subtitles—and her essay Instituting Inconvenience and Colonial Relations: The Genesis of European Contemporary Art Institutions in Mid-18th Century London (2025).
Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kirchenbauer’s work have been presented, for instance, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2021); and at the Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna (2021/22). Her videos and installations have also been exhibited in numerous duo and group shows as well as screenings at, among others, the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2026, ‘25); the Shedhalle, Zurich (2025); the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2023); d/p, Seoul (2023); the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan (2021); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019); the European Media Art Festival (2026, ‘24, ‘22, ‘20, ’16, ’14, ‘12, ’11); the Toronto International Film Festival (2021); the New York Film Festival (2021, ‘20) and the Berlin International Film Festival (2026, ‘25, ‘20). For her work UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS (2020), Vika Kirchenbauer received the EMAF Award, the EMAF Media Art Prize, 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 to give lectures, workshops, seminars and tutorials by a wide range of educational institutions, including 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 Hamburg University of Fine Arts; and the University of Hildesheim. From 2022, she was a Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art. In 2026, she was appointed Professor of Art in a Contemporary Context at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.