CONTACT ☎︎☎︎☎︎ mail(at)karinferrari.com ▶︎ ▶︎ ▶︎ LINK ▶︎ ▶︎ ▶︎ PDF CV
Karin Ferrari is a contemporary artist whose practice bridges fine art, media theory, and internet culture through interdisciplinary video, painting, installations, and performance. She has a sustained international presence marked by institutional recognition, major awards, media broadcasts, and thematic innovation.
Karin Ferrari uses visual material from pop culture and global media to investigate the present. Her work offers an artistic contribution to ongoing discussions around (dis)infotainment, and visual literacy. She’s particularly interested in what she calls trash mysticism — also her Instagram handle. Follow me. By this, she means contemporary, DIY forms of superstition and spirituality emerging online, as well as the hidden mystical desires that drive consumer culture. She is currently developing a research project about this at the Academy of Fine Arts titled Trash Mysticism™ – DIY Spirituality and Superstition in contemporary screen culture.
Karin Ferrari is a media artist — and something of a medium herself, though not necessarily a very good one. She works across a wide range of media, from woodcut to video.
Karin Ferrari earned her degree in Cultural Studies and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna — the cradle of psychoanalysis — in 2008. After that she worked for two years as an assistant curator for design at the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna and almost abandoned her own artistic activity until she spent one night binge watching reptilian shape-shifting news reporters on YouTube. Since then Ferrari has been working her video series DECODING (THE WHOLE TRUTH). These experimental docu-fictions claim to reveal hidden messages in music videos, advertisements and news intros. They are inspired by the knowledge production of digital subcultures on the threshold of paranoid political imagination and esoteric utopian desires. 2020 Ferrari’s started her ongoing research project Archi_Fictions of Ekstasis – an essayistic theory fiction art project about pseudo-sacred commercial architecture, issued in several volumes and supported by the Benno Barth Award and the BKA.
Her DECODING THE WHOLE TRUTH video series is on YouTube and has been shown internationally in museums, art-centres and on television.