Susanne M. Winterling

Susanne M. Winterling works across a range of media, including film, photography, sculpture, and performance. She is particularly known for her time-based installations, which critically examine the representation of reality. Modernist concepts, power structures, and hierarchical historiographies are captured and investigated through spatial constellations, while her practice also focuses on what pure information and form leave out. Her approach to media and materials is informed by an understanding of immersion and power as flows of energy, and by an emphasis on expanding perceptual and critical consciousness. Through affective and material-based research, Winterling explores the subjective relationships between producers, viewers, materials, and different species within ecological systems. A significant strand of Winterling’s artistic research focuses on ecology, epistemology, and science, with a particular interest in bioluminescence. This research has developed into *Planetary Sensing*, a broader scientific and artistic research network that investigates forms of sensing and knowledge across human and non-human realms. The project also envisages infrastructures for research and education in which humans and non-humans can work together and support one another. Winterling’s research also extends into questions of solidarity, collective knowledge, and alternative forms of dialogue. Her ongoing project *Pandora’s Box* functions as a platform and archive bringing together investigations, stories, conversations, and interviews around themes including aesthetic solidarity and empowerment. Conceived as a collective artefact, the project brings together artists, poets, and cultural producers from different perspectives, allowing their exchanges to become part of an evolving body of knowledge and artistic inquiry. Materiality and ecological processes are equally central to Winterling’s practice. Her work frequently considers how materials can mediate relationships between perception, technology, energy, and living systems. In *Shelter, the lighthouse of fragility*, first developed in 2013 at Keyhaven Nature Reserve in the New Forest, she used aerogel as a sculptural material. The work connects the material’s extreme lightness, insulating properties, and interaction with light to the history of the coastal landscape and to questions surrounding energy and technological development. Winterling’s investigations have resulted in projects and exhibitions presented internationally. Her exhibitions include *When Things Cast No Shadow* at the 5th Berlin Biennale in 2008, *Susanne M. Winterling* at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna in 2009, *A Disagreeable Object* at SculptureCenter in New York in 2012, *Nature after Nature* at Fridericianum in Kassel in 2014, *An Inventory of Shimmers* at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston in 2017, *Gravitational Currents and the Life Magic* at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong in 2018, and *TEMPERATE. under your skin, nanocarriers directed through the web of life* at Schering Stiftung in Berlin in 2021. Across these projects, Winterling brings together artistic, scientific, and ecological forms of research to examine how knowledge is produced and how perception can be shaped through material, technological, and biological relations. Her practice moves between film, photography, installation, sculpture, and performance, creating situations in which human and non-human forms of agency, sensory experience, and interconnectedness become part of a broader investigation into contemporary ecological and social conditions.