Katharina Sieverding
WORLDLINE 1968–2013
28 July–24 November 2013
Museum Schloss Moyland
Am Schloss 4
47551 Bedburg-Hau
Hours: Summer (1 April–30 September):
Tuesday–Friday 11am–6pm, Saturday–Sunday 10am–6pm; Winter (1 October–31 March): Tuesday–Sunday 11am–5pm
T +49 (0)2824 9510 60
info [at] moyland.de
Katharina Sieverding has created a broad and multifaceted body of work that has been of international importance in contemporary art since the late 1960s. Beginning with large-format photography, projections of films and slides and montages of photographs, she has worked with digital projections and video as well since 1999, making these into media for the content she negotiates.
Events in social and political life have often triggered developments in her visual language, which is characterized by techniques of layering, dissolves, solarization and appropriation. These techniques interact with a reflection on the self, understood as a social construct that confronts the observer in serial reproductions of the image of the artist as a mirror and projection space for communication and contemplation.
In a major exhibition, the Museum Schloss Moyland Foundation presents a project by the artist newly created for the show. At the center of the exhibition is the film DIE SONNE UM MITTERNACHT SCHAUEN, 2010–2013, for which Katharina Sieverding used NASA solar activity data gathered between May 2010 and June 2013. The result is an hour-long data projection encompassing 100,000 images, which the artist terms a “biography of the complementary sun.” In this work, Katharina Sieverding condenses scientific recordings into an impressive visual code with which she thematizes universal coherences in the energy of being.
In dialogue with the film are installations of representative groups of works from five decades. These images are now projected, with their original photographic media removed. Thus rendered into a sort of intangible concentration, they offer a dense overview of the artist’s work since 1968.
In addition, a roughly 90-meter-long frieze of recent photographic works “runs around” the inner core of projections to bracket the content and situate the histories. Drawing on the artist’s extensive archive, these works might be understood as translations in the sense of Walter Benjamin, as a seeing-again of images that condition other images, their aspect evolving over time. Like the folds of a coat, as Benjamin conceived translation, Sieverding’s works and the historical visual elements exist in relation to one another, here unfolding, there rearranging their layers anew.
