Heike Baranowsky
Heike Baranowsky is a German artist and professor of fine arts whose installations in film, video, and photography explore relationships between time, space and perception.
Working with static cameras, loops and restrained digital manipulation, she creates moving-image sequences sometimes described as "time-based photography".
Early life and education
Baranowsky was born in 1966 in Augsburg, then West Germany. From 1986 to 1995 she studied fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. At the Hochschule der Künste she was a master-class student of photographer Katharina Sieverding between 1993 and 1995, working within an environment that emphasised large-scale photographic and time-based works.She subsequently completed a Master of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1999. During this period she began to develop loop-based video and photographic sequences that combine still and moving images and which became central to her later practice.
Career
Baranowsky began exhibiting internationally in the mid-1990s, with early solo shows at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 1997, at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin in 1998 and 2000, and at Entwistle in London in 1999. Her video works were shown at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City in 1997, and in 2001, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin presented the first comprehensive survey of her work, bringing together pieces such as Radfahrer and Mondfahrt 2001 . In 2001, her work also featured in the exhibition Art in Technological Times at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which examined the impact of digital technologies on contemporary art.Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, among them Limitless: Berlin in Moscow at the Contemporary Art Center in Moscow, Loop at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, en route at the Serpentine Gallery in London and exhibitions marking the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2004. She took part in the touring survey 40 Years Video. Video Art in Germany from 1963 until today, initiated by the ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2006, and in the exhibition A Paradise Built in Hell at Kunstverein Hamburg in 2014, which examined artistic responses to catastrophe and resilience.
Between 2001 and 2003, Baranowsky was a visiting artist at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, teaching in photography and video. From 2005 to 2008 she served as professor of photography at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen, Norway. She was appointed professor of fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg in 2008, held the post until 2014 and has held it again since 2015, leading a class focused on fine arts with an emphasis on video and time-based media. Through this position she has organised workshops and collaborative projects with partner institutions such as Birzeit University and the International Academy of Art Palestine, as well as universities in the United Kingdom.
Baranowsky has received several grants and awards, including the Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank prize in 1996, the BDI Förderpreis for photography and video art in 1997 and the Eberhard-Roters Prize in 2000. In 2000, she was awarded a foreign residency scholarship from the Berlin Senate for Cultural Affairs, supporting her work abroad.