Pola Sieverding


Pola Sieverding is a German photographer and video artist. She works in the field of lens based media.

Education

Sieverding graduated in 2007 with an MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts where she studied under Stan Douglas, Ellen Cantor, Dieter Appelt, Sabeth Buchmann, and Katja Diefenbach. In 2002, she attended the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and in 2005 the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow.

Work

The artist's work questions traditional concepts of gender, culture, and normality; capturing both specific social spaces and the unique people who live in them. Sieverding's work primarily analyses the relationship between her subjects- individuals who range from women in traditional Islamic dress to drag queens, performance actors and the Berlin club scene- to their bodies. In recent years the artist has added to her work the depiction of equally unique architecture which is portrayed as means of being a specific social space. Continuously throughout the artist's work, materiality plays a significant role: be it elements of concrete and glass in Close to Concrete I and II, hair in To The Crowned And Conquering Child or textiles as in the photo series Text I-VI. In cooperation with Orson Sieverding, the artist develops electronic soundscapes for her installations which when projected onto her protagonists transform into urban echoes.

Grants

Sieverding has won an art grant from the Senate of Berlin twice, in 2008 and 2014. In 2011 Sieverding was invited as an artist in residence at the Meet Factory in Prague, the Maumaus in Lisbon, and as a visiting lecturer at the International Art Academy in Ramallah, Palestine where she received an art grant from the Anna Lindh Foundation. Today the artist resides and works in Berlin.

Notable works