Born in the year of the goat in Baracoa/Cuba, Elke Marhöfer is an artist living in Berlin. Via the potentialities of moving image and suppositious writing she works with notions of self-admitted foreignness and radical othering. She collaborates with dear friends and things, revising notions of animals, vegetables and objects. Within distant environments she investigates specific events and practices that traverse binary oppositions. Linking for example, the nonhuman with the postcolonial, she discusses how nature cuts across history, being simultaneously historical situated, evoking human and nonhuman testimonies of past and current events, recognizing their specificities, and at the same time surpassing and escaping historical formatting with its unique and machinic mode of constantly evolving, changing and creating something new. Elke tests nonhuman perspectives, translating a technology like the camera, from a human cultural and technical device into an extension of the intensive forces within the surrounding environment, so that the camera becomes a tool, which is in principle not different from nonhuman animal tools, similar to orangutans using leaves to make squeaky kiss noises.

Elke studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin, at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. In 2016 she was awarded a PhD by the University of Gothenburg. Since 2017 Elke pursues a post doctoral research in collaboration with Mikhail Lylov at the Kyoto University in Japan. She has received fellowships, grants, and generous support from IASPIS Residency Sweden, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Her art exhibitions include the Palais de Tokyo Paris, Manufactura’s Studio Wuhan, FCAC Shanghai, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, NGBK Berlin, Kunstverein Hannover, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and The Showroom, London. She lectures in conferences such as DARE, Deleuze and Artistic Research Conference Ghent, Deleuze’s Cultural Encounters with the New Humanities, Hong Kong and Daughters of Chaos, Deleuze Studies International Conference Stockholm. Her films have been screened at the BFI - Film Festival London, Berlinale Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival Ghent and Images Film Festival Toronto.

Nobody knows, when it was made and why

Material for Analyses for Oposition - MAO

Fragmented Forest

nearness to large rivers eats the eyes

sugar-free

Les exclus

Journal Officiel de la Republique Francaise II

lookin'out for Wachsamkeit

Erase you (Acéphale mix)

Without qualities

helle nacht nichten;

How to learn to like the same?

das ist die idee - quodlibet

mach dich weg und denke wir installation 2003

hip hop killed the video star installation 2003

moving territories installation 2003

are you sure what you are fighting for? print 2003

Attraction and Solidarity print 2003

air condition 225 Central Park West transfered in one day to 543 East 12th Street installation 2002

fuckem if they dont wanna see, o' listen o´read installation 2001

carottes installation 2000

phantomas entangled by aida Bosnia/Kosovo/Serbia/Republic of Macedonia, film 1999-98

theorie designt print 2004 - 1999