Blood and Guts in Grad School Pictures "Grandma" Prisbrey's Bottle Village Arbeiterinnen verlassen die Fabrik Sparks Cabin Essence Cinéma Vérité HOFER Fanfiction Pencilmania craftivism Christbaumschmuck New Year's Resolutions Offering Gifts Potentials Schöne gelbe Farbe
Kathi Hofer works conceptually across media and contexts.
Her installations are arrangements of objects, images, stories, and practices that reflect the world views of the environments she grew up in and moves within today. Drawing on forms of everyday creativity, she examines the relationships between class, value, artistic work, and life trajectories.
Central to Hofer’s spatial practice are collaborations, which she stages as performative interactions or as structural elements of her installations. In this vein, she initiates encounters in public and semi-private spaces between individuals or groups with different cultural backgrounds and skill sets. These unscripted performances are documented and assembled into new works through an open-ended editing process.
In 2019, Hofer stumbled upon the work of American factory worker and artist Tressa Prisbrey (1896–1988), whose monumental art environment Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, situated in Simi Valley, California, has remained in ruins after a devastating earthquake in 1992. In a gesture of artistic preservation, Hofer translated Prisbrey’s self-published memoir into German and published the original manuscript alongside the translation as an artist’s book.