Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. Through video, installation, music, and theoretical writing, Kirchenbauer’s practice 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 marginalised bodies become experienceable in exhibition spaces. Her first monograph is published by Mousse Publishing (2022), and unites essays and works from the past ten years of her practice.
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 (2021/22). Her videos and installations have been exhibited in numerous duo and group shows as well as screenings at, among others, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2023); d/p, Seoul (2023); the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan (2021); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019); the European Media Art Festival (2022, ‘20, ’16, ’14, ‘12, ’11); the Toronto International Film Festival (2021); the New York Film Festival (2021, ‘20) and the Berlin International Film Festival (2020). 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 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.