Vika Kirchenbauer

Wayward Canadian, Matthew, crushed by the isolation of being new to Berlin, turns his sexual desires toward Matthias that spiral into a dark fixation of assumed identity. Soon, this obsessive power struggle between the two, careens toward brutal passion and violence in a bid for dominance.

On the eve of his wedding Daniel meets again with his true love-his identical twin brother Jan. For the last five years he's been running away from his feelings. Now, on his stag night he is being tested once more.

An essay film approaching trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum – on what is felt but never seen.

The Capacity For Adequate Anger constitutes an attempt at a personal and self-reflexive form of artistic critique that considers contemporary art, in its production as well as its presentation, from a perspective of class. Alongside questions around the intersections of negative affect and political agency, the work problematises notions around upward mobility that the field of contemporary art both produces and presupposes. Deploying an essayistic approach, the video work reflects upon the manifold meanings of distance in both its subjective and social senses.

Rats are glorious deserters and we must admire them. Rats don't want to be captains trying to keep the cause afloat. But swim on open water.

YOU ARE BORING! discusses the troublesome nature of “looking” and “being looked at” in larger contexts including labour within the new economy, performer/spectator relations, participatory culture, contemporary art display and queer representational politics.

No description available.

Made for the performance project Cool For You, this video follows an artist’s research on thermal vision and the enhanced gazes of modern warfare. She uses these technical means to discuss intimacy and the body.

‘Special Works School’ was the codename used by the British War Office between 1917-1919 for a group of artists tasked with the job of ‘camoufleur’ - painters, textile artists, scenographers, designers, sculptors and scenic painters who were employed by the military to work specifically on developing camouflage technology. The artist, armed with the skill of rendering their surroundings with utmost acuity, was appointed to remove things from the realm of perception. Bambitchell’s ’Special Works School’ takes its name from this military unit to investigate the connections between artistic practice and surveillant technologies. With this video, the duo ask what an overtly aesthetic approach to surveillance can render visible, or invisible. By framing surveillance as an aesthetic practice, ‘Special Works School’ hones in on the psychic, embodied and material dimensions of surveillance - both from the position of the surveillor and the surveilled.

PLEASE RELAX NOW uses the screen as a source of light and darkness drawing attention to the issue of art consumption as individual vs. collective experience and extending it into physical space. Motivational language is interwoven with metaphysical gestures of salvation characteristic of economics as well as of what is considered "Political Art."

This is a large projection of aerial footage that has been shot by pigeons equipped with lightweight digital cameras. With heavy wind and the nervous flapping of wings the viewer gets only a fractured impression, though immediately identifiable, of a political demonstration.

At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in present-day Germany.