Barbara Hammann

Barbara Hammann (1945, Hamburg – 2018, Munich) was a German artist and art historian. After training as a bookseller, she studied art history, philosophy, theater studies, and psychology at the University of Munich and the University of Vienna. In 1972, she received her doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University with a dissertation on the German painter Hans Hinrich Rundt. Until 1976, she headed the foreign editorial department of the art magazine »Weltkunst« and also worked as a freelance editor and lecturer, as well as for radio and television. 

From the mid-1970s onwards, Barbara Hammann turned her attention to art and worked in a wide variety of media – video, photography, installation, performance, theater, street action, slides, sculpture, drawing, and artist’s books. After initially designing stage sets and receiving awards for her work, she increasingly devoted herself to the medium of video. In her video installations, she explored the physical foundations of the medium, its function as a device for perception, and the potential of feedback loops and self-observation. She created both video performances without an audience and interactive video works.

Based on her position as a woman in society, Hammann examined the relationship between the individual and their environment, as well as voyeuristic viewing structures. She explored the representation of the female body and the role of the female artist, explicitly criticizing male dominance in the Munich art scene. Another focus of her work was society’s approach to death. After a trip to Easter Island, she also addressed the colonial and ethnological appropriation of indigenous objects.

In 1982, Barbara Hammann received the ars viva art prize, and in 1985, she was awarded the Gabriele Münter Scholarship by the City of Munich. From 1992 to 2006, she was a professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. She lived and worked in Munich.

Barbara Hammann’s audiovisual archive, which has been housed at the ZKM since 2015, comprises approximately five hundred analog and digital videotapes, DVDs, and music cassettes of her video works as well as documentation of her installations.