From 1967, when she was still artistically involved with the Festival as assistant stage designer in Teo Otto’s production of The Magic Flute, Katharina Sieverding left a lasting mark on Salzburg, especially since 1995 through her continuous teaching as professor at the Summer Academy of Fine Arts. She is teaching for the 10th time in 2008. She has also inspired and helped shape the Salzburg art scene through her multiple exhibitions in Salzburg (1993: Kunstverein, 1995: FOTOHOF, 1996: Traklhaus, 1998: Residenzgalerie) and through her regular public lectures.
The exhibition “ENCODE VII/08”, which is extended by two projections and a book, is an attempt not only to discuss one of the artist’s current works in the overall context of her own work, but also to present her important contribution to the international history of the development of photographic and film art since the 1970s. Encoding is the process of transferring information from one format to another. This “encoding” plays a decisive role in Katharina Sieverding’s latest large-format works. Each image, recorded on black-and-white film with a simple, analogue compact camera, finds itself in such a process and constructs a space, a place for thinking about the art/culture system and its visual art production.

In doing so, the artist repeatedly quotes her own work and generates new pictorial inventions from it, which also expose socio-political and socio-cultural structures of the art business through permanent critical questioning. With her work, the artist has made an important contribution to the expansion of the concept of art and interdisciplinary media art practice since the 1960s.
“If one realises the peculiarity of photography of being the end of a becoming, and at the same time the becoming end, Katharina Sieverding places things in a hopeless becoming, knowing that photography is the only true art that nihilism has given birth to”. (Hubertus von Amelunxen)