Visibility and presence are among the key currencies in the artistic field. The emancipatory notions of the public sphere and of representation that were once associated with these concepts have now largely given way to a new, museumlike ‘economy of experience’. Recent decades provide vivid examples of just how successfully the unseen, the unheard of or that which is actively ignored can be integrated into this logic. Vika Kirchenbauer’s videos, installations and texts examine and intervene in these circumstances without obscuring their own entanglement within them. 
In YOU ARE BORING!, a group of queer performers appear in a black stage space of undefined dimensions and, thanks to stereoscopic 3D technology, address the audience directly in a larger-than-life manner. In a series of changing tableaux, they return the gaze directed at them, perform and, in doing so, lay bare the unspoken expectations, desires and fears of their audience. A visual relationship emerges that highlights the opaque within the visible and, in the act of becoming visible, reveals the structures – both empowering and violent – that make it possible.
COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE broadens this perspective to encompass the ideological and economic interconnections between art and colonialism. Historical documents – some presented visually, others recited and embodied by five performers – document the system of exploitation and dehumanisation upon which the first public art institutions in London were founded in the 18th century. Here, alongside values such as compassion and aesthetic judgement, class distinctions were also cultivated – in the service of social exclusions that continue to shape the art world to this day. 
The tension between presence and absence plays – also formally – a central role in UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS. The video unfolds as a loose sequence of observations centred on the limitations of our visual perception and traumainduced memory loss. What traces do emotions leave behind when they are so intense that they defy verbalisation? Where does the violence go that cannot be articulated in public? How can we (nevertheless) perceive what we have not learnt to see? 
Kirchenbauer’s latest video, THIS SUFFOCATING NOW, responds to a present in which state regulation and repression are increasingly and blatantly driving dissident voices and queer lives out of the public sphere. Through text and imagery, it interweaves urban, institutional and private spaces in which diverse yet parallel experiences of violence overlap. These convey the continuity of fascist ways of thinking and structures that elevate preventive discrimination and pre-emptive obedience to the status of a new norm – even in the artistic sphere. 
In her work, Kirchenbauer examines the ethical and political dimensions of making visible and becoming visible, of aesthetic contemplation and critical witnessing, with an awareness that experience entails responsibility.

You Are Boring! / Germany 2015 / 13:44 Min. / English / English descriptive subtitles

Compassion and Inconvenience / Germany 2024 / 30:00 Min. / English / English descriptive subtitles

Untitled Sequence of Gaps / Germany 2020 / 12:31 Min. / English / English descriptive subtitles

This Suffocating Now / Germany 2026 / 15:36 Min. / English / English descriptive subtitles