Across Classes

I trained at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 2003 to 2009 in the class of Lothar Baumgarten. That is what the bio says. It is also incomplete.

I did not stay in one class. From the beginning, I attended Katharina Sieverding's Visual Culture Studies — Hito Steyerl was there as a guest professor, and Steyerl is the teacher who shaped me most. I attended Experimentelle Medien. I went to Daniel Richter's painting class. I showed up at architecture classes I was not enrolled in, because the questions there were larger than the questions I was getting in painting. I sat in lectures across the school. I treated the institution as a set of rooms with different conversations, and I went to the conversations.

This was unusual at UdK at the time. The class system there was vertical: you joined a class, you stayed, you eventually became a Meisterschüler of your professor. The structure encouraged loyalty to a single teacher. I respected the teachers I worked with — Baumgarten was generous, Richter was clear, Steyerl was the one whose questions still operate in the practice — but the work I needed to make required moving across classes, not staying in one.

This period set the structure of the practice. Twenty years later, the work crosses substrate (conceptual, embroidery, wearable, spatial, photographic, film) and frame (gallery, foundation, residency, label, book) the same way I crossed classes at school. There is no central medium and no central frame. There is a position — it is always what you think it is — and the position is approached from whichever room is currently asking the right question.

Interdisciplinary is not the word for this. The disciplines are conventions of the institution. The work does not feel interdisciplinary from inside the work. It feels like one practice with many windows.

— Ole Ukena, 2026