Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Hungary
Katharina Sieverding: Close Up

The exhibition Katharina Sieverding: Close Up was seen at P.S.1\MoMA, New York in winter 2004/05 and at KW Berlin in autumn 2005.

Born in Prague in 1944, Katharina Sieverding has made a major contribution to opening up the concept of art and to interdisciplinary medial practice. Since the 1960s she has been working both in film and photography, using extremely large formats to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct her own portrait, gaining international acclaim by asking challenging questions of the politics of representation, gender and postcolonialism. Her work has frequently triggered debates on contemporary society, politics, social and cultural issues, one example being her collaboration with KW on the 1993 poster installation Deutschland wird Deutscher. Katharina Sieverding firmly believes that a responsible contemporary artistic practice must be politically committed, and that artistic practice has the task to develop complex positions that not only represent the accelerated processes of the present, but also critically reflect upon them. The action Die Pleite began in late September 2005, with posters in several hundred locations in Berlin. They showed an abstract image of a total eclipse of the sun, with the title appearing in the centre as a reference to the eponymous journal edited in the 1920s by George Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield.

Close Up offers a unique opportunity to see Sieverding’s cinematographic side, with the combination of cinema, film and video extending to the medium of photography. To mention only a few individual works on show, the exhibition includes the large-scale slide projections of Transformer (1973/74) in their dedicated spaces, the extensive series and tableaus of Stauffenberg-Block (1969) which cover entire walls, and To Look at the Sun at Midnight III/196 (1973). For the first time ever, the entire complex of Ultramarin I-XII (1993) are on view. Displayed on a mural developed especially for Budapest this work forms the focal point of the exhibition in the Ludwig Múzeum. 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 gelatin work with the title I-VIII/196 (1973), early monumental works from the 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.