Interface Cultures lädt zum Gastvortrag von Sonja Bäumel.

Sonja Bäumel’s artistic research explores ‘the living’ and the evolving perception of what bodies are made of. In active collaborative endeavours, she investigates the influence that scientific knowledge has had on the way we perceive and interpret the human body, and how historical, yet still predominant, views affect current society and the cultural contexts in which we operate, especially in the West. Rooted in self-experimentation, her work explores ways of encountering invisible and intangible beings while questioning the perception of the skin as the ultimate border for human and more-than-human bodies, embracing risk while directly engaging with living microbial entities, and venturing through landscapes, on a macro- and micro-level, to seek clarity as to where the environment begins and ends. Her work thus renders in-between spaces as vivid entanglements full of life, where the boundaries of trans-beings are dissolved, revealing as-yet unexplored forms of intelligence and communication. In this lecture Sonja will talk about several of her artistic projects such as Expanded Self II, Microbial Entanglement or Entangled Relations – Animated Bodies, being an artist in current times and her experience in exhibiting ‘the living’.

Sonja Bäumel is an Austrian artist, independent researcher and art educator based in Amsterdam and Vienna. Most of her projects involve long-term collaborations and extensive fieldwork. She creates process-driven, trans-disciplinary and imaginary, yet tangible microbial landscapes such as living paintings, sculptures, rituals, installations and performances intending to sense and thus better understand what the microbial paradigm shift means for the limits of the self and the relation between self-interest and collective behaviour. 

Sonja currently works as tutor and head of the Jewellery-Linking Bodies Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, as well as lecturing and holding workshops at different national and international academies and universities. Her work has been exhibited internationally e.g. at the Anthology Film Archives New York, the MAK Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe or the Centre Pompidou Paris. Her projects have also provided the basic impact for documentary films (e.g. BioArt – Kunst aus dem Labor, ORF/ARTE), to which she actively contributed. She was a co-founder of the Dunbar’s Number collective (2011-2016), a member of the Pavillion35 (2012-2017) collective, based in Vienna, and of the WNDRLUST (2013-2018) collective, based in Amsterdam. Most recently she had the privilege of representing Austria with the performed installation Entangled Relations – Animated Bodies at the XXIII Triennale Di Milano.

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Photo-credits: Entangled Relations – Animated Bodies, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, January 2023. Photo: Jakob Gsoellpointner