Siglinde Kallnbach

Biography

From 1976-83, Kallnbach studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel and attended the classes of Harry Kramer, Karl Oskar Blase, Georg Bussmann and Heiner Georgsdorf. She received a scholarship by the Evangelische Studienwerk Villigst. In 1977, Kallnbach spent an academic year in Auckland, New Zealand. In 1983, she graduated in fine arts, partly with the performance Examensperformance L(e)ine, and passed her Staatsexamen (Teacher Certificate Examination) in art education and English studies. Since that time, she has pursued her career as an international artist. In 1985, she was awarded a prize by the Robert Bosch Stiftung. Several trips led her to Oceania and South-East Asia in order to study, exhibit her work, or do art projects. Kallnbach held teaching positions at the Musahi University Tokyo, at the WAKO University Tokyo, at the Fachhochschule Bochum and the Kunstakademie Bad Reichenhall. In 2002, she finished training for multi-media design. Siglinde Kallnbach lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Life and work

Since the end of the 1970s, Siglinde Kallnbach deals with socially and politically relevant subjects in her performances and interventions such as discrimination, racism, war, and injustice. Through her frequent travels, she is concerned with transcultural aspects, e.g. basic human needs and rituals, which she cross-culturally compares to facilitate dialogue beyond cultural borders. In doing so, using her own body as an instrument of physical perception is of central relevance. Until today, Siglinde Kallnbach realizes the impact of social conditions and predicaments through her own body. In her early work, this often implied carrying herself to physical extremes. Kallnbach comprehensively includes photography, various objects and materials in her performances and installations and conveys complex cultural meanings by her highly symbolic acts. These do not only refer to an individually defined myth, but transfer her very own existential experience into a wider social context. Moreover, an important aspect of her artistic work is the active involvement of others. For example, in the second part of her Trilogy Kleinsassen (1985), she was able to unite 360 participations from 39 countries in her exhibition. For her project Wunschspur-Wishingtrack (1999–2001), she collected more than 4000 wishes for the future from all over the world and transformed them into a 460 m abstract track, which she presented in a maintenance tunnel underneath the Rhine on New Year’s Eve 2000 and 2001. Siglinde Kallnbach’s artistic work is closely related to life and the everyday. Since she was diagnosed with cancer for the first time in 2000, she started to address the disease and its impact also in her art, while she places the individual suffering into a wider social context. With her interactive project a performancelife (since 2001) that serves to express empathy with cancer patients, Kallnbach creates options to release creative energy so as to convey its transformative power for the benefit of patients, their relatives, and the medical staff. For her social commitment, she was called she who loves fire in Japan as early as the 1980s.

Solo performances and solo exhibitions (selection)

Works in public collections

Solo exhibitions (selection)

Group exhibitions (selection)

Publications (selection)