kathrin becker

Kathrin Becker
is a curator and has been director of the Videoforum at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK) in Berlin since 2001/2003.
Having studied art history and Slavic studies in Bochum, Moscow and St Petersburg and spent two years living in the former Soviet Union and Russia from 1989 to 1991, Kathrin Becker began working as an independent curator. Many of her early exhibition projects focused on the cultural exchange with the former Soviet Union and Russia – such as: “Dellbrügge/de Moll; Kunstkonsumentenprofile” at the CAC in Moscow in 1994; “Stalin’s Choice – Soviet Socialist Realism 1932–1956”, at P.S.1 Art Center/Institute for Contemporary Art in New York in 1993; “New Moscow” at the ifa galleries in Berlin, Stuttgart and Bonn in 1999/2000; but she gradually developed a more international orientation with presentations such as the exhibition sequence “The Institute of Theore(c)tical Painting” at Kunst-Werke in Berlin in 1994–1995 and a series of exhibitions about the interference of high and mass culture in early 1990s art (such as “art club berlin” at the Art Forum Berlin in 1997; “Can you hear me? – 2nd Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art”, at the Centre of Contemporary Art (CAC), Vilnius, the Kunsthaus Dresden and other venues, 1999–2001).
In 2001 Becker became director of the ‘Videoforum’ in the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, a video archive that now encompasses over 1000 works from the beginnings of video art up to the present day. Besides digitizing the archive’s holdings, she has been responsible for numerous exhibition projects and collaborations with institutions in East and West Europe, in the United States of America and Mexico.
In the last few years Becker has become increasingly interested in the question of the social dependence and political dimensions of art. In this respect the possibilities offered by combining visuality and ideological mood strike her as more interesting than documentary or anti-representative strategies – as for instance in projects such as “Masculinities” or “Displaced. Interventions/Interactions in public space”, both in Berlin, 2005.
Kathrin Becker’s exhibitions are generally accompanied by publications or extensive essays.