BIOGRAPHY
About Sabine Schäfer
Immersive audio-visual walk-in installations and interactive graphics, as hybrid artworks of the analogue and digital world, whose virtual levels can be viewed and heard via smartphone app.
With this artistic production, Sabine Schäfer’s works can be categorised in the fields of media art and sound art.
Her artworks are formed from image and sound motifs from nature and the world. The microcosm of animal sounds, processed nature photographs, scanning electron microscope images of insects and small creatures, but also satellite images and other scientific materials form the source material for her artistic work.
CV
Sabine Schäfer, media artist and composer, lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied composition with Prof. Wolfgang Rihm at the State University of Music Karlsruhe (concert exam 1992) and received the Siemens Media Art Prize in 1993 for the development of her “TopoPhonien”. As a DAAD scholarship holder, she visited international computer music centres in the USA and the Netherlands.
She is considered a pioneer in spatial sound art. Since 1992, she has produced a large number of installative audio-visual works. For Zaha Hadid’s architecture, she created a permanent walk-in installation in 2005 for the science centre “phaeno” in Wolfsburg, Germany.
In 2017, she invented a new artistic form of hybrid pictorial works with augmented reality per audio QR code or per image scan. She continuously produces new media artworks based on their aesthetic.
In 2021, she continued her innovative work with the art project Bats’n’Insects, funded by a grant from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg.
Sabine Schäfers´ works are part of the collection of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
Exhibitions (selection)
2023/24, Der gläserne Blick (The glassy view). Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden-Rot, Germany. (group)
2023, Sinneswandel (Change of meaning). Gallery of the city of Tuttlingen.(duo)
2022, Discovery Art Fair Frankfurt a.M., curated for the special exhibition space. (group)
2020, Seasons of Media Arts of the UNESCO City of Media Arts Karlsruhe (group)
Since 2020, GREEN CODE permanent garden installation. Karlsruhe Zoological Garden.
2018, Communication as processes of life. Lautrach Castle near Memmingen. (solo)
2015, Beyond Effi Briest. Potsdam Museum Forum for Art and History, Germany. (group)
2012, Sound Art – Klang als Medium der Kunst. ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. (group)
2013, Sound as poetry. Akademie der Künste Berlin. (group)
2006, raumKLANGraum – dissolving boundaries. Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany. (group)
2005, AquaAngelusVox. Maison de la Poésie, Paris, France. (solo)
2001, Sonic Rooms. Municipal Museum Ettlingen, Germany. (group)
1998, Nuova Consonanza. Rome, Italy. (solo)
1996, TopoPhonia. Muzeum sztuki nowoczesnej Warsaw, Poland. (solo)
1995, Hörbild. Berliner Festwochen, Klanggalerie des SFB Berlin. Germany. (solo)
1994, Irrton. Kunst-Werke Berlin, Germany. (group)
1992, TopoPhonicZones. Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe, Germany. (solo)
STATEMENT
The micro- and macrocosm of nature and the world is at the centre of my artistic work. In order to report artistically on something that goes beyond one’s own imagination, de-subjectivised basic material is required for artistic production. My preoccupation with the microscopic sound and visual worlds of fauna allows me to discover the subtlety of the richly varied internal structures of visual and audible spaces in order to form artistically designed spaces of experience.
