Katharina Sieverding

Katharina Sieverding is internationally recognized for her videos that recall the suggestive atmosphere and subtle mix of the comic and tragic of a Fassbinder film. Like Fassbinder, her approach to German culture and society is relentlessly critical and revealing in her merciless reexamination of German history. In this book of her equally sharp photographic work, Sieverding studies the scientific collection of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, comparing the precision of his scientific undertakings with the dramatic past of the Weimar. She has also designed the publication herself, making it a kind of artist's book and allowing her control over her endlessly clever artistic vision. Born in Prague in 1944, Sieverding studied under Joseph Beuys at the State Academy of Art in Dsseldorf, and currently lives and works in both Dsseldorf and Berlin. Her work has been exhibited all over the world, including the Venice, Paris and Sydney Biennials, and she was awarded the German Critics' Prize in 1994.