#160: Vika Kirchenbauer

Friday, 15 May 2026, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Vika Kirchenbauer 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 18^th-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.

All works in the programme include English descriptive subtitles.

Vika Kirchenbauer, who is present, shows:

YOU ARE BORING!, 2015, 13:43
Labour in the New Economy has become increasingly shaped under the proclaimed next economical step after the emergence of the service industry: the Experience Economy. With the slogan of “Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage” the theory suggests that goods will be used as props and services as a stage to create experiences that engage customers – or: “guests” – in an inherently personal and unforgettable way. YOU ARE BORING!—a work that is usually exhibited as a stereoscopic 3D installation—provocatively proposes to read the relatively recent institutional inclusion of art made from minoritised perspectives through the rise of the Experience Economy. Through strategies that overload the capacities of affective multitasking and the self-consuming illusion of total subjectivity, the spectator is personally addressed by the five performers in the work, and promised exactly what they need.

COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE, 2024, 30:00 min
The essay performance video looks at the first public exhibitions of contemporary art in mid-18th century London. Based on meticulous archival research, the piece traces prevailing conceptions of art to their ideological and material interconnectedness with ideas from Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment as well as with British colonialism. An oft-overlooked care facility for “deserted young children” is set as the genesis for the establishment of European art institutions, in which private economic and colonial interests intersect with notions of benevolence and the pursuit of refinement. Accompanying conflicts and discourses show how a rhetoric of democratisation along with simultaneous efforts at class distinction marked the art field from early on. The work reconstructs, for example, how artists at the time invented the exhibition entry fee to shut out those who, in their eyes, lacked the ability to judge art.

UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS, 2020, 12:31 min
Composed of short vignettes in different techniques and materialities, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS uses the form of an essay film to approach trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum—on what is felt but never seen. Carefully shifting between planetary macro scales, physical phenomena and individual accounts of affective subject formation, the artist’s voice considers violence and its workings, class and queerness not through representation but from within. Footage in which public visual memory stands in for personal remembrance exists alongside sequences recorded via infrared imaging and scenes captured under ultraviolet light or microwave radiation. The work tests the limits of vision and recordability, contemplating instances where a subject remains opaque to itself. Ghosts appear from holes ripped into time by an unremembered childhood, and a recently abolished witch-burning ritual in the artist’s rural home town serves as a foil against which to question the politics of visibility.

THIS SUFFOCATING NOW, 2026, 15:36 min
At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in Germany today. THIS SUFFOCATING NOW witnesses the historical present as a condition marked by vectors of violence that have continuously and habitually existed, and puts its focus on the fault lines that have most explicitly exposed the illiberal underbelly of a liberal state and society in recent years: Palestine solidarity as well as queer and trans rights. Drawing from a vast variety of source material, the 16-minute essay video flows in an uneven rhythm through still and moving imagery. Observations from the past three years—such as the increased police presence and recurring police violence, which Kirchenbauer captures from her balcony in Berlin—are viewed within a broader German historical framework. Over mundane images of her home improvement efforts, the artist problematises her own social ascent to becoming a university professor and civil servant. This personal reflection serves as an entry point to addressing the intimate relation between state and contemporary art in the German cultural system as a whole.

Vika Kirchenbauer (*1983) is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kirchenbauer’s practice were presented at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and at the Kunstverein Kevin Space in Vienna. Her videos and installations were part of exhibitions and screenings at, among others, the Shedhalle, Zurich; the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; d/p, Seoul; the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Berlin International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival and the European Media Art Festival. Two monographs combining the artistic and theoretical strands of her practice have been published by Mousse Publishing. From 2022, she was a Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art. She was recently appointed Professor of Fine Art in a Contemporary Context at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.