INHABIT #4 // Céline Berger
Foto: Stefan Hoffmann
March – May 2021
Céline Berger is a French artist and filmmaker who engages the linguistic and visual worlds of workers in different everyday contexts. Key to her practice is the investigation of processes, gestures, and patterns of behavior that characterize the workplace in corporate and institutional systems.
Her films and installations present a critical perspective on the spaces and architecture in which workflows take place, all the while interrogating the meaning of concepts such as efficiency and effectivity in the language of employees, managers, trainers, and coaches. During her residency with INHABIT, Berger will examine the descriptive tools, data, and graphics used by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in their studies, experiments, and methodologies. Drawing on her background as both engineer and artist, Berger is especially interested in the aesthetic experience associated with methods of quantification and the ways data and diagrams are used and represented.
At the heart of her project is a critical examination not only of how the methods and processes of quantification are used in specific studies produced at the Institute, but of whether the evaluation of an artwork’s aesthetic effects can be quantified at all. Berger’s research during her residency, her conversations with Institute scientists and experiences of cooperation, will provide the material for an experimental short film.
Biography
After studying physics and materials science, Céline Berger worked from 1997 to 2008 as a product and project engineer for different international microelectronics companies. In 2012 she completed a postgraduate course at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, received the Nam June Paik Award from the Arts Foundation North-Rhine Westphalia, and commenced a year-long arts residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her works have been exhibited internationally in such venues as the Karlin Studio, Prague; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Beursschouwburg, Brussels; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; UCLA’s New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles; and Generali Deutschland Holding AG, Cologne.
