Katharina Keller’s multimedia practice operates akin to a continuously expanding archive of locations associated with personal and collective experience and memory. Her video works, sculptures, installations, and textile works engage with issues of cultural identity, (family) history, and living environments—and with the situatedness and continuing relevance of those phenomena. Originally conceived as means of documentation, Katharina Keller’s videos have since become works in and of themselves, with their observational approach remaining a distinctive element of her practice.
For the fifth Another Eye, Katharina Keller will present two video works: On Sunday Weavers Weaving Flowers of Brocade (Shortparis) (2022) gathers diary-like sequences and fragments filmed between 2013 and 2022 in Germany and her birth city of Omsk, during her research journeys across Siberia and along the Pacific, and in transit between these diverse locations, all of which are formative elements of her biography. Recurring shots of the landscapes that Katharina Keller encounters during her journeys underscore—but seemingly also shorten—the enormous distances she journeyed for her artistic work. The landscape shots are accompanied by concert footage of the band Shortparis filmed by the artist in the fall of 2022; early that year the Russian band released the music video for Yablonnyy sad (“Apple orchard,” 2021), a video positioning them against the war of aggression launched against Ukraine. Other songs by the band had already taken a critical stance toward the post-Soviet nostalgia, advancing nationalism, and ongoing militarization cultivated by parts of Russian society.
In HYDRODAMALIS GIGAS (2020), Katharina Keller allows a range of visual and textual levels to enter, documentary-like, into dialogue with one another. Proceeding from her critical encounter with the figure of Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709–1746), a researcher and doctor who worked on the Kamchatka Peninsula, she retraces the history—one extending into the present day—of a manatee species (Hydrodamalis gigas) he described in 1741.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Gesa Hüwe (curatorial assistant at the Kunstverein) and Katharina Keller.

Another Eye is supported by The Gingko Foundation.