ART

What Becomes Visible: A Conversation with Katharina Sieverding

For this edition of Berlin Art Week, we had the honor of speaking with Katharina Sieverding.

Beatrice Sacco

Photo: Photo: Katharina Sieverding, Life-Death, 1969 © Klaus Mettig

A legendary figure in contemporary art, the German artist has based her practice on exploring the friction beneath it all. Through her large-scale self-portraits and video works, Sieverding analyzed relevant topics of our time, long before they entered the mainstream. She became widely known in the mid-1970s as one of the first to introduce monumental, large-scale photographs and iconic close-ups of her own face to the art world.

From the role of technology and the impact of racism to the nuances of gender fluidity, her practice acts as a vital framework for understanding the challenges of today’s world. In the face of numerous global crises, her work is now more contemporary than ever. Galerie Thomas Schulte will open her remarkable exhibition Life–Death on September 10th, presenting for the occasion her 1969 eponymous film and a series of her outstanding  photographic works.

— Technology always has a central role in your practice. As a person who was born in 1941 and lived through all the changes and shifts, what do you think are the new challenges that come with it? Or are they always in some way similar?

— Technology is not interesting to me simply as technology. It becomes interesting when it changes what an image can be. Photography still needs something from outside — a material that is exposed and the moment in which I release the shutter. I never considered the photograph to be reality, but there is an encounter with reality. With AI, that relation can disappear completely: images can be generated without that encounter. So the question for me is what this does to the concept of art, to authorship and to responsibility. The fascination with new technology is always there; the critical question is who uses it, for what, and what kind of perception it produces. The scale and speed are new, but the fundamental questions are not.

— Identity also has a relevant place in your practice. Works like Transformer (1973) anticipated contemporary discourses on gender fluidity and queer expression by decades. When you were blending masculine and feminine visages back then, were you consciously aiming to deconstruct the gender binary, or did you view it more broadly as a dissolution of the fixed self?

— I would not have used today’s terminology at the time. But the distinction between masculine and feminine was very consciously at stake. In Transformer, superimposed en face portraits of Klaus Mettig and myself merge into a kind of “third” portrait, a complex image that carries both feminine and masculine features. In that sense, the symbolic gender order is suspended. I wasn’t interested in replacing one fixed identity with another, but in the ambiguities of one’s own identity and that of the other — in identity as something relational, multiple and not finally fixed. Experiments with the self can really only be embodied by oneself. The other sex is also something one encounters within oneself.

— You made from the very beginning the choice to be the face of your works, and have worked with many self-portraits since then. They feel, however, as though they are not self-portraits in the classical sense, but more of a means to investigate photography and its forms of expression. Can you tell us more about this choice and the reasoning behind it?

— It was not a choice from the very beginning. With Eigenbewegung I was pointing the camera outward, as a witness to what was happening at the Academy and in the street. Around 1969 I turned the camera toward myself. But likeness and recognizability never interested me. My face was the most immediate material for an experiment in transformation — it could be solarized, mirrored, layered, enlarged or combined with other images. In that sense it can function like a mirror rather than as a classical self-portrait. The image is not there to tell you who I am.

— In your work, you frequently reference geopolitical issues and migration. Looking back at your iconic 1993 public intervention Deutschland wird deutscher, how do you read that phrase today in light of Europe's current right-wing shift and the recent politics on migration and border control?

— “Deutschland wird deutscher” was never an affirmative slogan. When the work appeared in public space, it was read in completely opposite ways — some people even understood it as right-wing propaganda, while for others it was clearly a warning. I have always found that ambiguity important: an image should not merely confirm what you already think. Today the phrase has acquired another, perhaps even more disturbing actuality. When belonging is again defined through nationality, borders and exclusion, the question is: who defines what “German” or “European” means, and who is excluded by that definition? National identity cannot be fixed; it has to reconstruct and question itself continuously.

— What are you working on at the moment? What projects do you have in store for the near future?  

— At the moment I am preparing several exhibitions that bring different periods of the work into new constellations. In October, Museum Schloss Moyland opens Katharina Sieverding in Dialogue with Joseph Beuys. It returns to the Academy years, to Eigenbewegung and also to my earlier work in theatre; a selection of drawings from the 1960s will be exhibited for the first time. And in 2027, a retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is being prepared. For me, returning to earlier material is never simply retrospective. The question is what becomes visible in it now.

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