After P.S.1, New York, and KunstWerke, Berlin, Ludwig Museum Budapest is the next venue to present the exhibition Katharina Sieverding: Close Up.
An outstanding personality of the contemporary German art scene, Katharina Sieverding was born in Prague in 1944. With her works of unprecedented consistency, she has made a major contribution, pushing the boundaries of contemporary artistic practice and gaining far-reaching international acclaim.
Since the 1960s, she has been working in both film and photography, using extremely large formats to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct her own portrait, asking challenging questions of the politics of representation, gender and post-colonialism.
Katharina Sieverding firmly believes that a responsible contemporary artistic practice must be politically committed, and that this practice has the task of developing complex positions that not only represent the accelerated processes of the present, but also critically reflect upon them.
Close Up offers a unique opportunity for the viewers to gain a comprehensive overview of Sieverding’s oeuvre, providing convincing evidence of the way she has extended the medium of photography through its combination with film and video.
Examples of her achievements are the large-scale slide projections of Transformer (1973-4) and the extensive series and tableaux of Stauffenberg-Block (1969), which cover entire walls, and Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen, or, To Look at the Sun at Midninght III/196 (1973).
Ultramarin I–XII (1993), displayed on a mural developed especially for Budapest, will form the focal point of the exhibition at the Ludwig Museum.
In addition to some of Sieverding’s most important serial photographic neon installations, such as the 336-part Motorkamera (1973/74) and the 196-part silver gelatine work with the title I–VIII/196 (1973), early monumental works from the legendary pioneering serial Grossfotos 1–X (1975–77) will be presented, including the picture which caused a censorship scandal in 1976: Vorsitzender Mao Tsetung begrüßt Präsidenten Dr. Siaka Stevens herzlich.
Alongside films such as Life-Death, Berlin (1969) and China, September – October 1978, Beijing, Xanan, Xian, Luoyang (1978, by Klaus Mettig and Katharina Sieverding), the latest data images from the serial Kontinentalkern, such as XVII/1980, will be LCD-projected. The latter will be juxtaposed with the double DVD projection Shanghai 2002/03.
In this show, Sieverding will relate her work to the context of the political and social climate of the 1960s and 70s in a curated archive. T.V. Sampler (1978–2001) presents television reports on Sieverding’s work and documentation on the closing of the Joseph Beuys master class at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Akademie Düsseldorf (1969).
Visual Studies I/2002 marks the beginning and the end of the show, which offers an encompassing overview of Katharina Sieverding’s oeuvre from the late 1960s to the present day.
A full-colour, 550-page catalogue with more than 400 full-page illustrations and essays devoted to Katharina Sieverding’s work accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue (with a Hungarian supplement) is available at the Ludwig Museum’s bookshop.
