Vika Kirchenbauer

Kunsthal Charlottenborg is proud to present the Vika Kirchenbauer Film Programme ‘I know you, and you know that’, curated by Tinne Zenner.

Three films are shown throughout the opening hours in Kunsthal Charlottenborg Art Cinema: LIKE RATS LEAVING A SINKING SHIP (24”, 2012), SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR (3”, 2016) and YOU ARE BORING! (14”, 2015). The film programme is screened 12 Nov – 1 Dec 2019 in the cinema, and can be experienced with paid admission to Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

About Vika Kirchenbauer
Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. In her work she explores opacity in relation to representation of the ʻotheredʼ and discusses the role of emotions in contemporary art, labour and politics. With particular focus on affective subject formation she examines the troublesome nature of “looking” and “being looked at” in larger contexts including labour within post-fordism and the experience economy, modern drone warfare and its insistence on unilateral staring, the power relationships of psychiatry, performer/spectator relations, participatory culture,
contemporary art display and institutional representation of otherness as well as the everyday life experience of ambiguously gendered individuals.

Her work has been presented in a wide range of contexts including Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s current exhibition ‘Art & Porn’, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Bonn Museum of Modern Art, ICA Artists’ Film Biennial, Donaufestival Krems, transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Hebbel Am Ufer Berlin, Ann Arbor Film
Festival, Images Festival Toronto, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, European Media Art Festival and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. She has given lectures at institutions such as New York University, Goldsmiths University of London, Otis College of Art and Design Los Angeles, the Ruskin School of Art Oxford, the University of Copenhagen, the Berlin University of the Arts, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and the Academy of Arts Kassel.

Films in the programme:

LIKE RATS LEAVING A SINKING SHIP (24”, 2012)
Following observations about how ‘coherent biographies’ are constructed, and partly based on the psychiatric assessments declaring the artist ‘incurably transsexual’, in LIKE RATS
LEAVING A SINKING SHIP Vika Kirchenbauer layers sometimes contradicting aspects of interpretation, information, memory and non-remembrance. The film reflects upon the ways in which such apparatuses as state, law and psychiatry do not only affect our present, but also the ways in which our lives are documented and interpreted in what we might call an ‘official memory’. Named “one of the 10 great transgender films of the 21st century” by the British Film Institute, LIKE RATS LEAVING A SINKING SHIP has won a series of awards and screened extensively.

SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR (3”, 2016)
SHE WHOSE BLOOD IS CLOTTING IN MY UNDERWEAR is a video made by Vika Kirchenbauer for her music project COOL FOR YOU. Following her research on enhanced vision via infrared technology in modern warfare, here she utilises these technological
means to discuss intimacy, the body, physical relations between bodies as well as the privileged gaze of the spectator. The video was awarded the prize for the best contribution to the German Competition at the 62th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

YOU ARE BORING! (14”, 2015)
YOU ARE BORING! discusses the troublesome nature of “looking” and “being looked at” in larger contexts including labour within the Experience Economy, performer/spectator relations, participatory culture, contemporary art display and queer representational politics. This web of thoughts find form in a 3D video installation focusing on five performers’ bodies as sites-of-speech removed from any physical context. Through strategies that overload the capacities of affective multitasking and the self-consuming illusion of total subjectivity, the spectator is personally addressed and promised exactly what they need. The work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions and is included in the collection of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein.