Katja Schenker
(born in 1968) lives and works in Zurich. During the spring of 2021, she is a senior fellow and guest at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome. Since 1999 her artworks have focused on the areas of live performances, sculptures and installations in internal and external spaces, highlighting the use of natural materials in most cases. The sensuality of these materials play an important role, as do their context, as well as their spatial and temporal dimensions, such as mass, gravity, permeability or perishability. Schenker’s artworks aim to thereby heighten the experience and perception of one’s own corporeality in relation to the bodies of the audience and that of the artist. She has received the Swiss Art Award three times, as well as the Swiss Performance Art Award and others. In 2021 she will be the recipient of the St. Gallen Cultural Foundation’s ‘Recognition Prize’. Katja Schenker studied comparative literature, art history and philosophy at the University of Zurich and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
