Conceived as a monographic reader, theis publication compiles for the first time an extensive, decade-spanning collection of Kirchenbauer's seminal and profoundly perceptive essays, the scripts of her widely celebrated moving image works in conjunction with selected video stills, as well as exhibition views.
This volume offers substantial insights into the Berlin-based artist, filmmaker, writer and music producer's research inquiries and aesthetic vocabulary. It also includes Kirchenbauer's two latest texts, exploring the relation between violence and visibility within the Western paradigm as well as the complex entanglements of European religious music and colonialism—research that has also fueled her solo music project COOL FOR YOU since 2015. This compendium is extended through novel essays by Oakland- and Los Angeles-based archivist, curator, and artist Leeroy Kun Young Kang and by Warsaw-based feminist philosopher and activist Ewa Majewska. While Kang looks at the social, affective and political implications of distance and proximity that Kirchenbauer so eloquently unfolds as powerful and meaningful techniques inherent in relations of oppression and emancipation, Majewska analyses the artist's elaborate and tortuous negotiations of violence and non-violence as lived and performed experiences.
Vika Kirchenbauer (born 1983) is an artist, writer, filmmaker and music producer based in Berlin. In her work she examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within societal power structures. Often relating personal and collective memory/non-remembrance to the politics of spectatorship, Kirchenbauer's work continuously negotiates the role of affects in the field of contemporary art and questions the ways in which marginalized bodies become experienceable in exhibition spaces.
