Katharina Sieverding: Life-Death

Created in what was then West Berlin, the work refers to an early phase of the artist’s career and to a historical moment marked by intense political, social, and aesthetic upheavals. Not least, Life–Death was shown at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, thus underscoring the work’s early art-historical significance.

Life–Death occupies a special place within Sieverding’s filmic oeuvre. The work was shot on 16-mm film during a phase that was formative both biographically and artistically. At the time, Sieverding was a student of Joseph Beuys at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and experienced the institutional conflicts and protest movements of the late 1960s at close quarters. Filming took place shortly after the events surrounding the temporary closure of the academy, in whose protests she was both an active participant and a documentarian. Life–Death thus represents not only an aesthetic search for new visual forms, but also the experience of a society in transition.

The film dispenses with a strictly linear narrative and instead develops a sequence of portraits, body studies, and metaphorical settings. Together with Othello, Stephan Runge, and Holger Bombusch, Sieverding appears in shifting roles and stagings. Heavy makeup, androgynous-looking costumes, gestures of transformation, and deliberately artificial poses create a state of perpetual transition. Opposites such as male and female, life and death, movement and stillness are not resolved but held in tension. The film’s visual language already points to cultural developments that would only gain greater visibility years later under terms such as glam rock, gender performance, or non-binary aesthetics. Sieverding’s experiences in Düsseldorf’s nightlife, particularly in the milieu of the legendary Mora’s Lovers Club, flowed directly into the work. There, extravagant fashion, role-playing, gender-bending, and performative self-staging were part of the nightly routine. In the film, these practices are not merely documented but transformed into an independent artistic language.

Music plays a central role. After an early version of the film with spoken text failed to convince, Life–Death received a new soundtrack in 1972 from the musicians who would soon gain international fame as Kraftwerk. The recording was improvised in a single studio session and documents an early transitional phase between rock, experimental sound research, and electronic music. Psychedelically floating, organ-like soundscapes permeate the film and plunge it into an almost trance-like state. Time seems to expand, narrative structures dissolve, while image and sound merge into a complex overlay. It is precisely in this connection between visual and sonic transformation that the work’s extraordinary relevance lies. Just as the characters oscillate between different gender roles and concepts of identity, the music moves between acoustic and electronic soundscapes. Neither the images nor the sounds allow for unambiguous categorization. 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 the artist’s work. The piece combines performance, photography, and film into a dense visual structure and signals a departure from Sieverding’s earlier theatrical practice in favor of an independent visual language. Already here, an understanding of image production becomes apparent that would have a lasting impact on her later work: images do not appear as finished representations of reality, but as sites of transformation where meaning is is constantly being re-created.

This perspective gains an additional layer in the exhibition through the subsequent transformation of the material. In the transition from analog 16-mm film to digital video and through the repeated editing of the material, the status of the original image shifts. It appears not as a historical document, but as open material that can be continually reconfigured. At the Thomas Schulte Gallery, this unfolds into a multi-layered visual space: the two-channel projection of the film enters into dialogue with large-format film stills and photographic tableaux, while the previously unpublished Polaroids form an intimate counterpoint—immediate traces of a moment that is already changing at the very instant of its fixation. Against the backdrop of today’s visual cultures, Life–Death feels surprisingly contemporary. In an age of constant image production, algorithmic visibility, and AI-generated visual worlds, the questions Sieverding posed as early as 1969 seem more relevant than ever: How are identities formed through images? How do technical media alter our perception? And how can meanings be kept open rather than fixed?

The exhibition therefore views Sieverding’s work not merely as a historical document of an avant-garde generation, but as a work of remarkable contemporary relevance. Its productive ambivalence keeps the poles of life and death, past and present, in suspension. It is precisely here that the intellectual and aesthetic consistency of this artistic practice lies, a practice that has lost none of its tension to this day. (Annika Karpowski)

Katharina Sieverding: Life-Death

• Opening: Friday, September 11, 2026, 6:00–9:00 p.m.
• Dates: September 12, 2026 – November 7, 2026
• Venue: Galerie Thomas Schulte, Charlottenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin

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