Pioneer in Life-Size Format
One of the women who have achieved great renown in the art scene is Katharina Sieverding. Since the 1970s, she has been creating large-format montages on current social issues. Her best-known works include the photographic work “Schlachtfeld Deutschland” (Battlefield Germany) from 1978, a statement on the RAF era, and the poster campaign “Deutschland wird deutscher” (Germany becomes German) in 1993 in Berlin, which addressed the radical right-wing attacks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An interview with the artist about art in times of the pandemic, her teacher Joseph Beuys and her political statements.
Katharina Sieverding in front of her own portrait and in the midst of her current solo exhibition, which shows photographs, projections and installations from the past five decades at Hamburg's Deichtorhallen until 25 July 2021.
You have been a successful artist worldwide for 50 years. Now, because of Covid-19, your largest solo exhibition to date laid dormant like a sleeping beauty.
That's an endearing, fairy-tale description. But this invisibility generated a whole new vehement publicity through interviews, television, film, press, magazines, covers and more. It is booming, so to speak, in the Deichtorhallen-Hamburg-Harburg Harald Falckenberg Collection. The planned catalogue is also a novelty. It will be a visual-visionary ascent, tour and descent over four floors along 6500 square metres of wall space: Photographs, installations, projections 2021-1966. The image, projection and installation conditioning will enable viewers to experience a life-size imagination through large format, image-rooms, cinema-magic, large-scale advertising spaces and a mirror cabinet with outdoor and indoor portraits. Harald Falckenberg called me the other day and remarked that never before has an exhibition in the DTH Falckenberg Collection generated such a highly frequented response.
“I wanted to formulate artistically independent, critical findings, statements with a large pictorial space.”
What does standstill do to you as an artist? What does it mean for the art business in general?
I am constantly working more, making myself available to the many interview requests. Reflect on the five decades, what contribution I have made and how damaging this “lock-down” of culture and art in particular is.
In November 1978, the large photo “Schlachtfeld Deutschland” (Battlefield Germany) referred to the student revolt in the Federal Republic: Purple on black, as if on an X-ray, a GSG-9 troop emerges.
How do you assess the situation for artists in Düsseldorf?
A disaster, like everywhere else. Two examples: I am preparing an exhibition for the “Parkhaus” in the park of the Malkasten, one of the oldest gardens in Düsseldorf, which is also listed. In 1860, the Malkasten artists’ association took the Jacobigarten under its care. The exhibition “Gefechtspause 2021”, is obviously the last one, the “Parkhaus” is to be demolished in favour of new building projects. Ancient trees have already been felled. Then Joseph Beuys. He would be 100 years old in May 2021. His home and place of work at Drakeplatz 4 is once again up for sale. Through the purchase, the state of North Rhine Westphalia and the city of Düsseldorf would enable a place for Beuys research on the international significance of his art and his teaching at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, on the “expanded concept of art”, on “social sculpture” and “art and photography” as an initiation for the “Deutsches Institut für Fotografie”. (The Beuys student was on one of the Drakeplatz advisory teams and spoke out in favour of a purchase. As she recalls, there were many good ideas at the time that would have justified an acquisition.)
Your themes move between self-portraits and the political. Why did you choose yourself, your face, your body as a means of expression?
To clarify and expand identity, individuality, representation in the social body. The I that personifies itself in the photograph is neither identical with itself nor someone completely different. Do pictures cut into events, are they events, do they happen or do they depict?
Sieverding's art is not narrative but analytical. This includes the previously unseen work “Gefechtspause II”, which is also a reaction to “what now preoccupies us as a viral image of the enemy”.
The camera is your medium - what was the trigger?
My father was a radiologist. After initially studying medicine, doing terrific theatre work with Fritz Kortner and Teo Otto from 1963 to 1967, from the Vienna Burgtheater to the Salzburg Festival, I decided to become an artist on 2 June 1967, the day of the murder of the student Benno Ohnesorg due to the demonstrations against the state visit of the Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi in West Berlin. I wanted to formulate artistically independent, critical findings, statements with a large pictorial space.
“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art, he once said.”
And then you met Joseph Beuys...
In my time at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, he was the only teacher who interested me – with the expanded concept of art, the so-called “social sculpture”. I would include my work in this emancipation from the old traditional understanding of art from the very beginning. (In 1969 Sieverding photographed the events in Beuys’ class. She documented the actions daily in order to inform those students who had not experienced the events of the previous day in the form of a wall newspaper. The result is a unique historical testimony – “Eigenbewegung”).
As a student, she documented the student protests in front of the art academy. "Beuys said: you do this, someone has to do this. You have to do that: Innovate art through photography," Sieverding said.
Can you remember your very first encounter with Beuys?
In 1965, I saw his action at the Schmela Gallery “How to explain the pictures to a dead rabbit”. That touched me very much.
What remains of the man in the felt hat?
He is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art,” he once said. Considering the multitude of art careers that have emanated from his class, he was right.
Large-format photographic art combined with political and social issues – that's what you stand for. Are the "old" statements still valid?
Yes, unfortunately. They become current again and again. The question is: what kind of blueprint of the world can the picture dare to make and, in radical negativity, put the facts on the table to unfold in the future?
What outrages you today?
The “biological war”, the “viral enemy stereotype”.
How important was and is Klaus Mettig, artist, life partner and father of your children Orson (musician and producer), Ossip (master carpenter) and Pola (artist and filmmaker) for your art?
A personal, professional and familial encounter of destinies. A partnership of supreme responsibility and support. Without him, from 1973 onwards, the life-size format would not have been made possible and realised. He is a great artist.
You will turn 80 in November – any plans?
To continue working. •
VITA
• Born in Prague
• 1963-1964 Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg
• 1964-1967 Studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the class of Teo Otto
• 1967 Change to Joseph Beuys' class, graduates as Beuys' master student 1972
• 1970s: Teaching positions in the USA and Canada
• 1992-2007 Professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts
• 1995-2007 Intermittent lectureship at the International Summer Academy in Salzburg.
• 2002 and 2004 lectureship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou/China.
• Since 2010 lectureship at the Graduate School of the Berlin University of the Arts.
• Her works are represented in renowned collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Kunstsammlung NRW. Katharina Sieverding lives and works in Düsseldorf-Pempelfort.
Katharina Sieverding
Sie gehört zu den Pionier*innen, die früh die vielfältigen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten von Fotografie erkannt haben und das Medium fortwährend inhaltlich und formal erweitern. Im Mittelpunkt ihrer Arbeiten stehen Transformations- und Präsentationsvorgänge, Fragen nach Identität, Gender und Race. Sie traut sich, die vermeintlichen Grenzen des Kunstbegriffs und der Fotografie auszudehnen. Bekannt geworden ist die Künstlerin durch die Konsequenz, mit der sie filmisch und fotografisch ihr zum Teil extrem vergrößertes und auf vielfältige Weise manipuliertes Porträt seit den 1960er-Jahren einsetzt.
Interview Dagmar Haas-Pilwat
Pictures Katharina Sieverding