We couldn’t be happier to have Vika Kirchenbauer, an ally and contributor since the first Berlin Art Film Festival, as this year’s patron (saint). She will be presenting seven of her works at our kick-off screening on December 3rd and will be talking with curator Katrin Mundt about her complex video art pieces.
“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 ʻotheredʼ 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.”