Draft:Dunja Evers

Dunja Evers Dunja Evers (born 23 September 1963) is a German artist and gallerist. Her diverse body of work mediates between painting, photography, and film, challenging the boundaries of genre and those between reality and fiction.

Dunja Evers lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf where she has been based since 1995.

Early Life and Education Evers was born in 1963 in the German city of Hamburg. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she was a master’s student under Arnulf Rainer. During her studies, she started to experiment with performance art, drawing inspiration from powerful female figures in Greek mythology such as Demeter. Evers staged her performances in unconventional locations such as a pigsty and factory hall, sometimes in front of an audience, other times in front of the lens of the camera. One notable performance organized in Marseille, France, in 1985 involved dressing as a siren with a costume made of raw fish and trapping individuals in a fishnet during the exhibition. Later, Evers switched from behind to in front of the camera lens, dedicating herself to photography.

Work Evers’s artistic practice was largely influenced by an accidental discovery in the late 1980s. When her projector broke, she could not stop at a single frame to take stills from her latest Super-8 films and photographed the running projection instead. Upon developing the negatives, Evers described finding herself captivated by their hybrid nature situated between painting and photography. This serendipitous technique became a cornerstone of her ouevre – first with portraits, then landscapes, and eventually encompassing media imagery.

Definite yet abstract, Evers’ work oscillates between figuration and abstract planes, balancing on the edge of reality. Her use of vibrant colors –sunflower yellow, cadmium red, cobalt blue, petrol green, and others – evokes various emotional responses, from warmth and tenderness to coldness and detachment. Beneath their attractive surfaces, the works reveal underlying layers of meaning and symbolism – like “colourful x-rays” , as the former director of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Urs Stahel, remarked.

Evers’ portraits are characterized by their ethereal quality, often appearing like apparitions rather than traditional depictions of individuals. They capture the fleeting nature of life, inviting viewers to contemplate the essence of humanity and the passage of time. In contrast, her landscapes create a less transient and more immersive viewing experience, intertwining architectural elements with dreamlike imagery. These works reflect inner selves and subconsciousness, providing a space for introspection and exploration.

Evers’ exploration of media imagery began in the early 2000s and continues to today. One of her most noteworthy works is I Have a Dream from 2004. In this piece, Evers combines three videos into a single installation: One depicting the moon landing, another capturing Woodstock festival, and the third projecting a pornographic film. Together, these videos explore themes of liberation, both from constraints of gravity and societal conventions of the time. While Evers’ portraits draw on subjective individual memory, this work and series like Cowboys (2006-2007) have a stronger iconographic foundation, circulating as part of visual culture and the popular imagination . Media reflection is key to Evers’ oeuvre.

With the rise of digital technologies, Evers embraced more digital methods in her artistic practice, from the adoption of automatic cameras and Inkjet printing to the utilization of image editing and manipulation tools like Photoshop. We see this in series like El Dorado (2012-2013).

As her artistic practice progressed, Evers temporarily experimented with cyanotyopes in 2009. A photo chemical process developed in 1839, cyanotypes go back to the beginnings of photographic history. Series like A sunny afternoon (2009) stand in stark contrast to the digital techniques Evers uses in her other works, emphasizing qualities of texture and depth that are often lost in the digital realm.

Beyond techniques, Evers’ innovative approach extends to thematic explorations as well. This is evident in her work during a residency in Osaka, Japan, in 2012. Here, she focused on the concept of time and impermanence, utilizing different mediums such as cigarette smoke, burning candles, and projected candlelight to examine the life of things in the absence of human control. Her work First Light (2012) is a poignant reflection on the transcience of life and the implications of human intervention, or lack thereof, on the world around us.

In her latest works, Evers explores the interplay between nature and culture. Influenced by Bruno Latour’s and Donna Haraway’s writings , she challenges traditional dichotomies and embraces a perspective that sees humanity as inherently intertwined with the earth, rather than separated from it. In Fermenting John Wayne (2023), which was exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Leverkusen, Evers confronts the idolization of Hollywood figures and the narratives they embody by submerging film rolls from iconic movies into solutions packed with mushrooms and probiotic bacteria . Over time, the film decomposes, yielding fragmented scenes that invite viewers to think about the cultural significance of popular media while celebrating organic processes of decay and renewal.

Evers has exhibited widely for over two decades. Notable exhibitions include Zustände (2002) at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Kunstverein Göttingen, as well as We are not alone (2009) and Printed matter (2009) at Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Room n°6000 (2012) at Art Osaka, Inside Out (2012) at Baikado Contemporary Art Gallery, and Fermenting John Wayne (2023) at Kunstverein Leverkusen.

Together with her partner, German artist Thomas Mass, Evers founded the gallery boa-basedonart in Düsseldorf-Flingern in 2018.

Other activities

Teaching Evers held lectureships for photography at the University of Dortmund, Germany, between 1996-2000 and in 2005. Moreover, she worked as guest professor for photography at the University of California, USA, in 1997.

Collections Evers’ works are represented in prestigious public collections in Germany such as the Berlinische Galerie, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Lenbachhaus München, Bundeskunstsammlung, and Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg. Evers is also part of several private collections such as the Stiftung Kico, DZ-Bank Frankfurt am Main, BBDO, Allianz, UBS, Swiss Re, and more.

Gallery In 2018, Evers co-founded boa-basedonart gallery . She serve as director and co-curator together with her partner, artist Thomas Mass. As a young gallery, boa-basedonart has an eclectic program with an evolving focus on female artists, Fluxus, and multi-media contemporary art practices that sometimes enter into dialogue with pre-modern Asian art, primarily ceramics.

Boa-basedonart has participated in DC Open gallery weekends and joined the Art Düsseldorf fair in 2023 and 2024.

Recognition • Goethe Institute working grant for Marseille, France (1985) • Grant of the Stiftung Kulturfonds (1994) • Grant for female artist with children of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia (1997-1998) • Artist in residence, Kulturamt Düsseldorf / Ernst-Poensgen-Stiftung / ooo-projects / e-ma Osaka, Goetheinstitut Osaka (2012) • Grant of the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Neustartkultur (2019) • Grant of the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW (2020) • Grant of vg bildkunst (2021) • Grant of the Stiftung Kunsthonds, Neustartkultur (2022)

Solo publications • Dunja Evers, We Are Not Alone. Kehrerverlag, 2009. ISBN: 9783868280906, 3868280901 • Dunja Evers, Constellations, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2011. ISBN: 9783882436358, 3882436252