AGNES MEYER BRANDIS


in conversation with 


HEIKE CATHERINA MERTENS


Program director of Hatje Cantz Publishing

Her Ways and Means – Female Protagonists In The Arts And Science Contexts presents major female artists in conversation with scientists, writers and curators. All of them are known to be extraordinary creative workers and have at some stage in their career moved into the crossover-zone between the arts and science, both, independently and in collaborative projects with individual scientists or institutions. Their results and practices have been widely acclaimed by the art world and scientific community alike. 

Being driven by questions such as “what is real?”, “how do structures and forces empower thought?”, “what is it that changes the perception of our world?” our guests` work addresses the wealth of topics and experience inherent in any interdisciplinary approach.

The artists will share with us stories of the actual process of making. How did they contact established scientific institutions, high-end researchers and communities? What obstacles and prejudices did they encounter? Did scientific procedures affect their methods and thinking? And did the scientists receive certain ideas from the artists? Did their work method change or their assessment of research?

Whatever may have been the case, the artists’ urge to overcome genre barriers and to translate their questions and intuitions into something productive required a similar amount of research, expertise, daring and curiosity to that of the classic researcher.

About the speakers:
The artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis, born 1973 in Aachen, Germany, studied mineralogy for a year, then transferred to the Art Academy in Maastricht, the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Cologne Media Art Academy. Coming from a background of both sculpture and new media art, she explores the zone between fact and fiction. She is the founder of the Forschungsfloss FFUR/Research Raft, an Institute for Art and subjective Science.

Based on an artistic experiment and performance in weightlessness conducted in cooperation with the German Space Agency DLR her work concluded in a series of realizations dedicated to gravity, flying, floating and falling, manifesting themselves in various installations and long-term performances or experiments such as the Moon Goose Colony (since 2011, ongoing). More information on her homepage: www.blubblubb.net.


Heike Catherina Mertens is program director of Hatje Cantz Publishing. Prior she was Executive Director and artistic director of the Schering Foundation in Berlin and curated numerous exhibitions with internationally renowned, contemporary Artists. She is an advisor for public art projects and member of the curatorship of the Kairos Price of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation (F.V.S.)

In March 2017, Satellite Berlin - Art in collaboration started the talk series Her Ways and Means – Female Protagonists In The Arts And Science Contexts. In 2018, the series will continue as a joint project with Satellite Berlin. The Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques, in cooperation with Satellite Berlin, will plan the series and make a selection of guest speakers and invite them.