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About the work
Katrin Niedermeier’s new work entitled "idle idol sweat shop" echoes the methods of consumer-feed back-chains by using the body, the item and the image as shells and vessels. It is to be filled up with experience and meaning, or better said, as knowledge, producing intelligence and future idols that influence our entire lives in the analogue as well as in the digital world.
These pieces characterise idle poses that are performed by a professional dancer in movement into newly produced and knitted sweaters. Each sweater and its knitted motif is developed and inspired by previously purchased digital characters, avatars, their fictional environment and imagery, but also by explicit wording taken from the receipts of the avatars' contracts and licenses.
Katrin’s multi-layered performances, shop and videos of this series could be seen as abstract portraits of each sold item. They are filled with meaning and should be experienced by functioning within normative structures rather than disruptive.
This applies by playing ‘feminine’ online presence stereotypes and their image production by using readily available consumer software, copying this methodology for different aspects of this artwork.
Bio
Katrin Niedermeier’s artistic practice often thematizes the area of humanly constructed spaces of longing, fictitious or real nature. She investigates how these ideas manifest themselves in the form of „Arcadian“ gardens, virtual landscapes, avatars or personal fantasies. Her work shows the ever-changing relationship between virtual and analog spaces, while its implementation and development is exactly at the boundary of these two areas. Often digital formats, mostly animations, are the starting points of her works, which she then translates into installations, physical objects and paintings, allowing a dialogue with each other. Here the virtual world as an entity with its own authorship is questioned and its potential and impact in the analog and digital spheres is explored. Before her studies at the Institut Kunst HGK, FHNW, in Basel, Katrin Niedermeier studied fashion design at Esmod, in Munich and Oslo, and worked as a designer for Christian Dior and Jeanne Lanvin, in Paris, and Nicky Hilton, in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions and video screenings include „Hypertension“, Pylon Lab, Dresden (2020), Corona Kino, HGK Basel (2020), „Idle idol monika” Palazzina, Basel (2020), „I and the Machine“ Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, Freiburg, „Avatare, Doppelgänger und allegorische Landschaften“ HEK, Basel (2019), “Kaliningrad Museum of Fine Arts“, Kaliningrad: “videocity Basel – Kaliningrad”, TBA21-Academy „ihood“ at Kunsthaus Baselland (2019), „trans environmental exercises“ at Atelier Mondial in Basel (2018) and „Kurs“ in Raum 103, in Basel (2018).
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