Alina Schmuch

Taking up photography and film, Alina Schmuch explores the intersection of visual media and reality through artists’ books and video installations. She studied Media Arts at HfG Karlsruhe and was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Schmuch’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Akademie der Künste, and at the 15th Architecture Biennale with Forensic Architecture. She has received the Visual Arts Work Stipend from the Berlin Senate, the 27th Bremen Award for Video Art, and the MAK Schindler Scholarship. Currently, she is involved in Hydromedia, an artistic research programme focusing on water’s vital role in our lives and addressing environmental challenges.

During the residency, Schmuch intends to develop a moving-image installation based on her research into bathrooms and sewage systems. In her series Bathroom Studies (2022 – ongoing), the bath is regarded as an interface where technology and the body meet and the relationships between the public and the intimate, visibility and invisibility, are negotiated. As part of ALTERLIFE, she will focus on the entanglement of the bath and the environment, connecting Vilnius and Amsterdam by filming their specific bathing cultures. She will delve into water as a unifying entity for healing rituals, filming basins as sculptural objects that hold both water and bodies. She is especially interested in furniture with an animistic appearance and its role as a mediator between the human body and surrounding waterways. Next to external, collective bathhouses used throughout history, she films contemporary high-tech bathrooms that collect data about the body and are understood as digital health centres. What do approaches of undesigning the bath look like? Besides scenes of interiors, landscapes, and hydrological processes, she researches amphibian life forms – animals and plants that move between the boundaries of wet and dry, and which have always been associated with the otherworldly.

Alina Schmuch. Undesigning the Bath

Alina Schmuch’s Alterlife residency award is a partnership between Rupert and Sonic Acts, Amsterdam. Alterlife is a project of Re–Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action, and funded by the European Union.