Sigrid Hackenberg

Biography

In her observations of time, place and culture, Sigrid Hackenberg uses video to take part in what she terms an "ongoing exploration of the poetic." Documenting the poetics of the everyday in her understated, often minimalist works, she discerns "a spiritual presence in nature, sound, objects, people and 'places.'" Evoking memory, travel and transition, her diaristic observations have been recorded in travels to Spain, Korea, Pakistan, and in her own apartment in Brooklyn.

Hackenberg's tapes and projection installations articulate symbolic explorations of identity and otherness. In her videotapes, two channels of video are often positioned on one screen as a formal and metaphorical device, simultaneously conjoining and displacing physical and psychological realities. The viewer is made aware of the artist's presence, the process of recording and composing images. Medium and close shots affirm the intimacy of her quotidian subject matter; extended sequences mirror the temporality and immediacy of original footage.

Hackenberg writes that her works "integrate a poetic point of view within a wider political and theoretical awareness of the cultural and technical apparatus through which my art emerges."

Hackenberg was born in 1960 in Barcelona, Spain, and grew up in Spain, Germany, Japan and Canada. She received a B.A. from San Francisco State University and an M.A. from New York University. She has had one-person shows at Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Roger Merians Gallery and AC Project Room, New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museo Laboratorio Di Arte Contemporanea, Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Rome; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paolo; Stedelijk Musueum, Amsterdam; Aperto '93, XLV Venice Biennale; LACE, Los Angeles and ICA Philadelphia. She is the recipient of grants and awards from The Kitchen/Media Bureau, New York; the Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds Award, Newark Valley, New York; and the New Arts Program Video Festival Experimental Category Award, Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. She teaches video art at New York University. Hackenberg lives in New York.