Berlin Fellowship 2025 — Visual Arts
Sarah Doerfel
*1986 in Ingolstadt (DE)
Lives in Munich (DE) and London (UK)
Web: www.sarahdoerfel.com
Instagram: @sarahdoerfel
Vita
Sarah Doerfel’s works deal with temporal and physical transition zones. Speculative narratives unfold in the context of philosophical, medical-historical and scientific research. For beings in constant flux, a clear separation between life and death, past and future, self and environment dissolves. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including at Shedhalle Zürich, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, MACRO Museo in Rome and the Kunstverein München in Munich. She has received grants from the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts, among others. She studied visual art and photography & video art in London and Munich.
Residency
During my fellowship, I will be working on a multimedia installation. The project takes a closer look at the crossing of boundaries within the human body, drawing on Marcel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic and expanding its scope to include historical and current discourses. Specific aspects touch on the manual work with the “material body” that surgeons perform; the philosophical role of light in the darkness of the body’s interior; the unfathomable, unpredictable landscape of the interior in relation to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and the attempt to control it through the progress of medical technology in a capitalised health system.