Akademie der Künste

Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2017. Katharina Sieverding

12 Jul - 27 Aug 2017

Katharina Sieverding
Deutschland wird deutscher XLI-92, 1992
five-colour offset print, 351 x 252 cm
billposting in Berlin from 30 April to 12 May 1993.
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ PRIZE 2017. KATHARINA SIEVERDING
12 July – 27 August 2017

The Akademie der Künste is presenting this year’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize to Katharina Sieverding. In awarding the prize, the Akademie is honouring a German artist who has played a key role in ushering in the age of large-scale photo art since the 1960s. Since her time as a student of Joseph Beuys, her works have consistently addressed the topic of “identity as individuality and dividualism, and as a collective individual”. From the start, she placed a main focus on film and photography in her creative work. Sieverding raises fundamental questions about the artistic, political and social conditions for the production processes and reception of art. In her oeuvre, she unites aspects of archiving and cultural memory, self-reflection, provocation, the political and analytical as well as the influence of mass media and the latest technologies on the individual.

To mark the occasion of this award, the Akademie is holding a special exhibition dedicated to Katharina Sieverding’s oeuvre, with 20 of her works in the 252 x 356cm format, some displayed as large-scale posters in public space since the 1990s, and nine wall-size projections, each showing 580 photomontage triptychs from TESTCUTS 1966-2010.

Katharina Sieverding was born in Prague, and lives and works in Düsseldorf. She began studying in Hamburg at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, working at the same time as Fritz Kortner’s assistant at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus. After switching to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, she attended Teo Otto’s stage design class from 1964-67, then changed to Joseph Beuys’ class until 1971, and completed her studies in 1974 in Ole John’s film class. Sieverding was associated with a feminist art scene, yet steadily expanded ‘difference-based’ feminism with the transgender issues important to her. She developed a clearly unique position, emphasising a “media construction of the artistic imago”. In 1992, Sieverding set up the Visual Culture Studies programme at the Universität der Künste Berlin, and was closely involved with it over the next eighteen years. She has participated in such international exhibitions as the Paris Biennale (1965, 1973), documenta 5, 6, 7 in Kassel (1972, 1977, 1982), the Venice Biennale (1976, 1980, 1995, 1997, 1999), the Biennale of Sydney (1982), the Shanghai Biennale (2002) and the Busan Biennale in South Korea (2016). In 2006, she took part in the “40jahrevideokunst.de” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen. Until 16 July 2017, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn is showing the exhibition “Katharina Sieverding. Art and Capital. From 1967 to 2017”. In 2004, Katharina Sieverding was the recipient of the Goslarer Kaiserring international prize for contemporary art.

The exhibition is accompanied by a small-format paperback catalogue.
With the kind support of the Cologne Kreissparkasse which funds the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne.
 

Tags: Joseph Beuys, Käthe Kollwitz, Katharina Sieverding