Katharina Bayer (BMKÖS)
Katharina Bayer is mentee of Severin Dünser
Katharina Bayer (*1987, Gmunden/AT) graduated in Architecture at the Graz University of Technology in 2012. In 2016-2020 she studied Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK with a guest residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago SAIC.
The factor of time is a recurring motif in her work, whose manifestations she stages in photography and moving image. In expansive installations of static long-term photographs, the viewer becomes an integral part of the work and a measuring instrument in the experiment of spatial references. The source material is provided by scenes of public space—located in the field of tension between anonymity and intimacy—, fleeting moments of everyday life in the oscillating interplay between observing and being observed.
In her current video work she dedicates herself to the monuments of international data traffic. Transmission towers in the Swiss Alps, which are expected to disappear in the near future due to more modern transmission technologies, form the starting point for an intensive examination of the history and relevance of wireless information exchange. The work mediates between the extremes - between the physical presence of the transmission towers and the immateriality of data transfer, between the spatial distance of the transmitters and the digital bridging.
Her video works have been shown at the Austrian Cultural Forum London, Salzburger Kunstverein, UG im Folkwang (Museum Folkwang), and SITE Galleries Chicago, among others.