SOPHIA KÖHLER
ARTIST
ART EDUCATOR
Artistic practice that arranges and connects historical and contemporary research material with drawings in form of lecture performances. Experience in developing participatory formats, conceptual work, and collaborating with children, young people, students, artists, and institutions.
An open network of ideas and thoughts consisting of drawings, research materials, music, texts and images, which is brought together in lectures and published in small zine-like publications. Main topics include architecture and design history, feminist and queer narratives, knowledge systems, philosophy, fashion, pop culture and educational models.
CV
born 1996 in Landshut, Germany
lives and works in Munich
STUDIES
2014 – 2021
Academy of Fine Arts Munich
WORK
2026
Artistic Assistant at AdbK, Munich (Nils Norman)
2024 - 2026
Magazin Munich
2022 - 2025
Artistic Director of Der Fahrende Raum
2017 - 2021
Buchhandlung Walther König at Haus der Kunst, Munich
PERFORMANCES / PROJECTS
2025 - ongoing
roofs+ramps at Domagk Ateliers
an und für sich viel zu tun - Arbeitsfeld Kunstraum, Lothringer13 Halle (conceptual and organizational contribution)
2024
container lecture at Lothringer13 Halle
Front Office Residency with the collective LeBlocccate at Lothringer13 Lokal
2022
Contribution to the project website plantage-dachau.de
2020
carpet of obsessions at AdbK Munich
slacker at Kunstverein Munich
PUBLICATIONS
2024
container lectures (zine to the lecture)
2022
Ludewig
Ruinöses Tagebuch
2020 - 2021
Texte zur Performance 1-4
Sophia Köhler ZeitsKhrift MüNCHEN, Antenne Publishing, Ed. Texas Knuller
AWARDS
2022
Winner of Bayerischer Kulturpreis
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WEBDESIGN
ARTIST STATEMENT
At first glance, Sophia Köhler's art appears to be a Janus-faced affair, consisting of chatty
multimedia overlaps of correspondence, publication, performance, and pedagogy on the one hand,
and an ongoing drawing practice characterized by consistency and calm on the other.
These minimal drawings of interiors and landscapes prove to be notations around and through
which stories of artists, writers, and friends are spun, namely through supplementary material.
Hierarchical distinctions are not apparent in these categories of personal associations. The fact
that the separation between art and education is not merely a diversionary tactic to be exposed in
an aesthetic process of dissolution was demonstrated in the exhibition that Köhler presented on the
occasion of her exam at the ADBK in an aesthetic process of dissolving art into life. Their
intertwining is suppressed in her work in order to preserve the boundaries that allow the disciplines
of art and education to flourish. Köhler produces intensively researched kaleidoscopic lectures that
include stories and meditations on the music of Sun Ra, underground publishing, the untold feminist
origins of computer science through textile manufacturing, and speculative ecological futurism, in
which deeply subjective connections are made through metaphor and elective affinity. These are no
less artistic than her seemingly quiet drawings, whose sensorial restraint signals the limits of
explication. Nevertheless, both represent one pole in the controversial dyad of art and education.
With her work, Köhler has developed a dialectic of art and pedagogy that is entirely contemporary
precisely because of its refusal to allow one to dissolve into the other.
Text by Justin Lieberman