Berlin · 11/09/2026
Katharina Sieverding: Life–Death
For Berlin Art Week 2026, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents Life–Death, an exhibition by Katharina Sieverding. At its heart is the 1969 film of the same name, accompanied by large-format film stills. Made in what was then West Berlin, the work reflects an early phase of the artist's practice and a historical moment of intense political, social and aesthetic upheaval. Its inclusion in documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 was an early sign of its art-historical importance. Life–Death occupies a singular place within Sieverding's films. It was shot on 16mm during a period that was formative both personally and artistically. Sieverding was then studying with Joseph Beuys at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and experienced at first hand the institutional conflicts and protest movements of the late 1960s. Filming took place shortly after the events surrounding the academy's temporary closure – protests in which she took part both as a documentarian and as an active participant. Life–Death therefore embodies not only an aesthetic search for new visual forms, but also the experience of a society in flux. Rather than following a linear narrative, the film unfolds as a sequence of portraits, studies of the body and metaphorical settings. Alongside Othello, Stephan Runge and Holger Bombusch, Sieverding herself appears in changing roles and stagings. Heavy make-up, androgynous costumes, gestures of transformation and deliberately artificial poses create a state of constant transition. Opposites – masculine and feminine, life and death, movement and stillness – are not resolved but held in tension. The film's visual language already anticipates cultural developments that would only become widely visible years later, under labels such as glam rock, gender performance and non-binary aesthetics. Sieverding's experience of Düsseldorf's nightlife, especially in the orbit of the legendary Mora's Lovers Club, flowed directly into the work. There, extravagant fashion, role play, gender transgression and performative self-staging were part of everyday night-time life. The film does not document these practices but translates them into an independent artistic language. Music plays a central role. After an early version with spoken text proved unconvincing, Life–Death received a new soundtrack in 1972 from the musicians of Kraftwerk, who were soon to achieve international fame. Recorded in a single improvised studio session, it captures an early transitional phase between rock, experimental sound and electronic music. Drifting, psychedelic, organ-like soundscapes run through the film and lend it an almost trance-like aura. Time seems to stretch, narrative structures dissolve, and image and sound fuse into a complex, layered whole. It is precisely in this union of visual and sonic transformation that the work's exceptional relevance today lies. Just as the figures oscillate between different gender roles and notions of identity, the music moves between acoustic and electronic worlds. Neither images nor sounds can be neatly categorised. Instead, an open space of ambivalence emerges, in which identity appears as a process – as continuous movement rather than a fixed category. At the same time, Life–Death marks a turning point in Sieverding's work. Combining performance, photography and film into a dense visual structure, it signals her departure from earlier theatre work towards an independent visual language. Already here, an understanding of the image emerges that would shape her later practice: images are not closed representations of reality but sites of transformation, where meaning is constantly renewed. In the exhibition, this perspective gains a further dimension through the later transformation of the material. In the shift from analogue 16mm film to digital video, and through repeated reworking, the status of the original image changes. It appears not as a historical document but as open material, capable of endless reconfiguration. At Galerie Thomas Schulte this gives rise to a richly layered pictorial space: the dual-channel projection of the film enters into dialogue with large-format stills and photographic tableaux – direct traces of a moment that was already changing at the instant it was captured. Against the backdrop of today's visual culture, Life–Death feels strikingly present. In an age of relentless image production, algorithmic visibility and AI-generated imagery, the questions Sieverding raised as early as 1969 seem more urgent than ever: How are identities shaped through images? How do technical media transform our perception? And how can meaning be kept open rather than fixed? The exhibition thus presents Sieverding's work not merely as a historical document of an avant-garde generation, but as a work of remarkable contemporary urgency. Its productive ambivalence holds the poles of life and death, past and present, in suspension – and therein lies the intellectual and aesthetic rigour of a practice that has lost none of its tension to this day.
