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Staff Profile

Professor Uta Kogelsberger

Professor of Practice

Background

Uta Kögelsberger is an artist based in London. Her artistic practice articulates and engages with ecological, social and political concerns through photography, video, sculpture and sound. Recent projects have included Fire Complex that contributed to changes in wildfire prevention in California, Forest Complex a major commission in response to the pressures Alpine Forests have come under in the wake of the climate emergency and Uncertain Subjects, a series of durational billboard performances in the public realm in response to the political landscape in the UK in the run up to Brexit (2017-2019).


Kögelsberger’s practice frequently positions itself beyond the gallery walls and in the public realm. It has been exhibited, at the Royal Academy, London, Momus, Thessaloniki, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles, Millard Sheets Arts Centre, Ponoma, BTV-Stadtforum, Innsbruck, Brighton Photo Biennial, Brighton, Art Night, London in collaboration with Whitechapel Art Galleries, at Bluecoat, Liverpool, Spacex, Exter, Les Rencontres, Arles, at SPG, London, the Barbican, London, Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC, and the Glassell Project Space MFAH, Houston amongst others.


Kögelsberger was awarded the Royal Academy Charles Wollaston Award and her work is held in public and private collections including the MFAH (Museum of Modern Art Houston) and the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum) a.o..


Link to personal website

Link to Fire Complex website

Link to FILET gallery website

Link to the Producers: Art Monthly






Research

Uta Kögelsberger is an artist based in London. Her artistic practice articulates and engages with ecological, social and political concerns through photography, video, sculpture and sound. Recent projects have included the RA Wollaston Award winning Fire Complex that contributed to changes in wildfire prevention in California, Forest Complex a major commission for the BTV Stadtforum in response to the pressures Alpine Forests have come under in the wake of the climate emergency and Uncertain Subjects, a durational billboard performance in the public realm in response to the political landscape in the UK in the run up to Brexit (2017-2019).


Kögelsberger’s practice frequently positions itself beyond the gallery walls and in the public realm. It has been exhibited, at the Royal Academy, London, Momus, Thessaloniki, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles, Millard Sheets Arts Centre, Ponoma, Brighton Photo Biennial, Brighton, Art Night, London in collaboration with Whitechapel Art Galleries, at Bluecoat, Liverpool, Spacex, Exter, at Les Rencontres, Arles, at Southwark Park Galleries, London, Danielle Arnaud, London, the Architectural Association London, the Barbican, London, and Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC, and the Glassell Project Space MFAH, Houston.


Kögelsberger has won the prestigious Royal Academy Wollaston Award, been awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship, the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship, the EAA Award for Art in Architecture and the SPD silver medal for editorial photography. Her photographic essays have been published in Wired, Esquire, GQ, and American Photography.


Her work is held in public and private collections including the MFAH (Museum of Modern Art Houston) and the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum).



Summary of recent projects:


Forest Complex brought together a new multifaceted body of photographic, video, and sound works that observe the complex societal, political, and ecological entanglements surrounding the pressures mountain forests have come under in the wake of the climate emergency. The works in this exhibition delve into the multiple ways in which humanity is responding to the climate emergency. It runs in parallel to an experimental and speculative replanting project that targets forests that are essential for the critical safety function of Alpine Forests.


Fire Complex follows the causes and the devastating aftermath of the 2020 Castle Fire that destroyed 170,000 acres of California forest, including an estimated 10-14% of the global population of endangered Giant Sequoias.

Fire Complex brings together photography and video in the public realm and on instagram to raise momentum and resources for the regeneration of our forests. It involves a replanting project developed in collaboration and with the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, USDA Forest Services, Cal Fire and the communities of Sequoia Crest, Alpine Village and Cedar Slope. The public facing aspect of the work has been developed with the support of the Faculty Research Fund, Newcastle University, the support of Alchemy Media (USA), Standard Vision (USA) and Buildhollywood (UK).


Uncertain Subjects situates itself between the photograph as historic document, performance and a work of activism. In a series of durational performances large scale 48 sheet billboards were constantly covered and recovered with new billboards: Each billboard a head and bare shoulder portrait of people who – in the face of Brexit – feel this country no longer represents their best interest, people who feel like they have become alienated within their own country and many whom have decided to move out of the UK. The work gives a voice to those who feel they have been silenced by the failing democratic processes. It brings a personal lived experience back into the conversations surrounding Brexit.


Orchestra of Rocks: Not Rock Concert, Rock Concert andCave Music are a playful evocation of ancient rituals, myth and man's desire, often futile, to gain control over nature. Each exhibition was different versions of an installation combining sculpture, experimental sound and live-performance and included collaborative contributions by experimental sounds artists and life performers including Atau Tanaka , Dane Law (Adam Parkinson), xname (Eleonora Oreggia), Shelly Parker , Chooc Ly Tan, Marv Radio,The Noize Choir, Mariam Rezaei, Will Edmondes, and Tom Richards. It was first exhibited as part of the Whitechapel Art Night Associate Programme and transformed St Olave’s Church on Hart Street, then as part of the GETN at the Boiler House, and finally in the Hub, Lonodn. An immersive environment of sculptural installation and sound, based on Kögelsberger’s recordings of individual raindrops, captured with experimental recording techniques, experimental sounds artists and performers created improvisations of trancelike, rhythmic and ritualistic soundscapes hovering between abstraction and dance track referencing the increase of rainfall due to climate change in the lake district. 


The Antipode Series The Antipode project seeks to make complex global relations palpable through a set of photographic diptychs that collapse geographical space by joining two exactly opposite points of the globe in a single image. At the core of the inquiry are the political implications of the redefinition of geographical space. In our one world society invisible international networks of, primarily, but not exclusively economical, cultural, and ecological systems supersede national boundaries. The resulting collapse of geographical space is arguably the most significant change impacting on the current political landscape. By drawing seemingly unrelated spaces together through a set of geographical co-ordinates the series seeks to create unexpected connections to draw attention to the fact that in spite of differences our worlds are inextricably connected. 


Pockets of Freedom; Off Road is the second installment of a Trilogy of works that looks at controlled pockets of freedom in the United States and how these notions are manifested in a unique relationship to the American landscape. It explores freedom as a construct that is instrumental in sustaining the political system that houses it. Off Road was developed out of an intense and sustained over a five-year period at a State vehicular Recreation Area in California. The location consists of a very large area of sand dunes, the south side of which borders on a nature reserve. In the work this close proximity of two contrasting sites acts as a metaphor for two very different interpretations of freedom. These contradictions are materialised by juxtaposing visual languages. The work seeks to redefine ways in which video and photography can be combined in contemporary art. Central to this is the way that time is represented, and an exploration of the boundaries documentary and fictional filmic languages. Off Road has been exhibited in a one-person show at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London in January 2014 and reviewed on viral net, a curatorial project of Tom Leeser (Cal Arts), screened at the California International Arts Foundation and exhibited in Brussels and acquired for the permanent collection at LACMA. 


The American book project: This project brings together 10 years of previously unpublished photographs, drawing on a collection of approximately 10000 medium and large format negatives to edit them down to a large-scale, limited-edition book project of 184 photographs. Instead of focusing on a coherent narrative, topicality or subject matter it specifically seeks to disrupt narrative, coherent representation or meaning to focus on the medium of photography as such. It is a reflection on the changing nature of how we receive and disseminate photographic images.


Upcoming

2024 Cull, with LACMA collections exhibition for Pacific Standard time LA, USA

2025  Solo exhibition, Hatton Gallery, UK

 

Past

2024 Forest Complex, solo exhibition, BTV Stadtforum, Austria

2023 The Spectre of the People, Momus Thessaloniki, Greec Bani Abidi, Craig Ames, The Archive of Public Protests (A-P-P), Kimberly dela Cruz, Lauren Greenfield, Christian Lutz, Boris Mikhailov, Paolo Pellegrin, Wolfgang Scheppe, Prarthna Singh, Carey Young amongst others

2023 Off Road, Millard Sheets Arts Centre, Ponoma

2022 Cull II, five channel video installation, Royal Academy, London

          Winner of the 2022 Royal Academy Charles Wollaston Award

2022 Fire Complex, A series of large-scale photographs in the public realm exhibited across Los Angeles in a project hosted by Alchemy Media *

2021 Golden Hour, California Photography from LACMA collections exhibited Off Road as a single channel video,

·      VPAM (Vincent Price Art Museum), East Los Angeles

·      Northridge Art Galleries, Los Angeles

2021 Cull I, 5 channel video, Marriott Live with Standard Vision Art Programme, curated by Caroline Haydon*

2021 Division/Revision: Group exhibition including works by Larry Achiampong, Victor Burgin, Jasmina Cibic, Jeremy Deller, John Kippin, Uta Kögelsberger, Melanie Manchot, Hardeep Pandhal, Hetain Patel, Ingrid Pollard, Eva Stenram, Mark Titchner, Jane & Louise Wilson and Alberta Whittle taking place across 15 billboards across 6 UK cities with the support of Buildhollywood and JackArts

2021 Fire Complex: digital and paper billboard, Shepherd Bush Roundabout, Your Space or Mine

2020 Rock/Drop: An interactive performance between liver interactive amplified reality Rock and Atau Tanaka produced for the Array 360 Music Festival in collaboration with Atau Tanaka and Vytautas Niedvaras, The Albany Theatre, London*

2019 Uncertain Subjects Part VI: an on-going installation of 4 large billboards, Great Eastern Wall Gallery, Village Underground, London *

2019 Cave Music: a sculptural installation including sound a live performance including the battle of the Rocks between beat boxing champion Marv Radio, with contributions by Atau Tanaka, Chooc Ly Tan and Shelley Parker *,

2019 Uncertain Subjects Part IV as part of an exhibition curated by the Contemporary Art Society, including works by Catherine Opie, Martin Parr and Sam Durant

2019 Uncertain Subjects Part VII, included in the Royal Academy Summer exhibition

2019 Off Road as part of Unframed, celebrating local donors, LACMA, Los Angeles,

including works by Catherin Opie, Barbara Kastern and Christina Fernandez

2018 Uncertain Subjects Part III: a series of Action Photographs in the Public Realm, as part of A New Europethe Brighton Photo Biennial*

2018 Uncertain Subjects Part II: Action Photograph/Billboard performance for Art Night in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery *

2018 The Nature of Things, Les Nuits the L’Annee, Les Rencontres, Arles 

         Shortlisted for Lumens Dummy Book Award

2018 The Nature of Things, The Tbilisi Photo Festival, Tbilisi, Georgia

2018 Rock Concert II, The Boiler House, Solo exhibition with performances by the Noize Choir, Will Edmondes and Mariam Rezaei, The Boiler House, Newcastle Upon Tyne

2017 Uncertain Subjects; Mail-art project launched at 4Cose, London *

2017 Orchestra of Rocks: Not a Rock Concert, Art Night in collaboration with Whitechapel Art Gallery, curated by Fatos Ustek, a sculptural installation with sound including contributions by experimental sound artists and DJ’s: Atau Tanaka, Shelley Parker, Tom Richards, Nathalia, Dane Law, Xname *

2016 Foreign Encounter, group-show including works by Anthony Gormley, Richard Grayson and Wolfgang Weileder amongst others, Munich, Germany

2015 Playing the Cave, Tullie House, video installation as part of New Expressions

Commission, Carlisle *

2015 South by Southwest, solo exhibition, 2 video installations and a series of photographs, Abbot Hall, Kendal *

2015 Cinema IV, artwork in public realm, Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere *

2015 Waiting for Los Angeles, video installation, Ex-Libris, Newcastle, UK*

2015 Slash Seconds, a series of photographs part the series On Freedom: Boys and Their Toys of group-show curated by Peter Lewis, including works by Melanie Manchot, Carey Young, and Uriel Orlow amongst others Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah

Teaching

My educational background was in sculpture, but I have mainly been working with photography and video since 2002. These are also the main areas on inquiry I supervise.

I have taught into all years of the BA and the MFA. I supervise PhD students.

I devise and co-ordinated the Visiting speaker Program as well as the Producers Series:

The Producers Part II 

Visiting Speaker Programme

Publications