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ANNETTE VON KEUDELL
Annette von Keudell works at the intersection of image, sculpture, spatial arrangement and movement-based performance. Her works offer an intense insight into a media art practice that deliberately avoids committing to defined forms of expression, but instead emerges in the transitions between body, space and perception. Recurring themes include fragmentation, reflection and the shifting of planes of reality – a processuality in which the familiar becomes alien and visibility appears precarious. Annette von Keudell combines conceptual thinking with her own visual rigour. At the centre is the human body as an interface between inside and outside, between visibility, construction, erasure and resistance. Often alienated, deliberately isolated, sometimes as if frozen, partly archived, numbered, intentionally deprived of clear legibility and seemingly already belonging to a different temporal order. Annette von Keudell examines precisely this abstract relationship between the body, pictorial space and media construction, particularly in the digital context, and analyses socially conditioned patterns of gaze and attributions with regard to the body read as female and its representations. The focus here is not on the image as a representation, but on the question of its conditions: how presence arises, how identity is formed, and under what conditions it disappears in the digital realm.
Annette von Keudell studied painting and experimental film under Prof. Helmut Herbst, time-based media at the Berlin University of the Arts under Prof. VALIE EXPORT, and was a master’s student of Prof. Heinz Emigholz. In addition to her artistic work, she teaches media art, moving image and feedback methodology at European universities.
Annette von Keudell lives and works in Hamburg.
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Exhibition text – By the way: I
Between presence, identity and digital disappearance
What remains when the body is no longer seen, but calculated? What disappears when visibility becomes a condition of existence? Bodies are not depicted, but interrogated. Figures that appear without being recognised. Bodies that elude systemic recording – fragmented, mirrored, overexposed, digitised, emptied. Model-like or artificial, present and yet not intended. In a present where identity can increasingly be indexed, optimised or erased, a visual “by the way” is formulated – a marginal note that inscribes itself without conforming. Visibility is not a neutral state. It is regulated, selective, distributed. It is about disappearance – not as an aesthetic effect, but as a social process. And about resistance: against classifications, against smoothing, against disappearance under the guise of representation. Resistance here means not only confrontation, but also the insistence on ambiguity, the holding fast to that which cannot be fully translated into systems. At the same time, the attempt to opt out becomes visible – as an anti-surveillance gesture that subverts the grid.
Some figures appear as camouflage, others as disruptions. They elude mechanical logic by creating blurring, reflections or overexposure. They rely on the productive power of the unrecognisable. This withdrawal is not a complete departure from the system – rather, it is a tactical manoeuvre on the fringes, a shifting of one’s own legibility, a play on the possibility of being overlooked. This creates an interstitial space in which bodies are neither fully present nor entirely vanished. “By the way: I” is not a statement, but an interruption. An afterthought. A gap in the system – and perhaps the beginning of a different kind of visibility.
MULTIPLE BOX – Exhibition dates: 4 September to 4 October 2025
