Olivia Wiederkehr works in the fields of performance, installation and sculpture.
With consistency and a love of experimentation, she is always finding new ways to translate existential questions into forms that can be experienced by the senses. In doing so, she constantly challenges herself and exposes herself to risks – and so does the audience. The artist, who studied scenography in Berlin and fine arts in Basel and Zurich, also transfers this dynamic into her complex, installative settings. The site-specific space or the place assigned to a work are fundamental parameters that Wiederkehr questions or stages under the sign of the atmospheric. Historical sources serve as a substrate for her work, as do philosophical texts, which she uses to explore political and social spaces. Her performances, which are often created in collaboration and dialogue with dancers, mainly take place in public spaces and are located in the field of ephemeral, sculptural monuments. She sees the driving force in her work as not just leaving thinking in thoughts, but evoking it as an active action. She is constantly searching for new aesthetic and artistic strategies and dialogical possibilities to translate this active attitude into material and movement.
Olivia Wiederkehr is an artist with a background in scenography who works across media. From photography, drawing, video and sculpture, to costumes, choreographed performances and room-filling installations in both museum and public contexts. Wiederkehr was born in Schlieren in 1975, lives and works in Zurich and Brugg.
She studied stage design and fine arts in Berlin (KHB) and Basel (FHNW) and completed a Master Fine Arts in Zurich (ZHdK). She teaches project-based artistic education in public schools and at art colleges (ZHdK), was a long-time board member of the Klingental exhibition space, and co-founder of the Panch Performance Art Network Switzerland. Her works are represented in collections of the city of Zurich and by private companies. At irregular intervals she curates and organises performance events and festivals. She recently received a travel grant from the Canton of Aargau to deepen her political interest in Greece. Her busy exhibition schedule and invitations to perform have taken her regularly to Switzerland and abroad in recent years.