FLUX installation, 2025.                                             Photo: Lorenzo Arrigoni

Kurt Hentschläger moves between installation and performance; his work is primarily audiovisual and spatial in nature. Questions of human perception and individual and collective consciousness, particularly as they are shaped by technological change, form a core concern of his practice.

His approach is interdisciplinary, connecting fine arts, sound and live arts, and, at longer intervals, public art. The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the all-encompassing universal art form—informs his work. Architecture, and the experience of space, inside or outside, as a fundamental aspect of being human, is an equally important focus.

His working process embraces ephemeral and experimental methods, both by choice and necessity, reflecting the fluid and unstable nature of digital media itself. He is drawn to the unforeseeable, to the unintended consequences of entering unfamiliar territory, and to the risk of failure and crisis inherent in such processes.

These interests led early on to questions about cognitive processes in the human brain: how we perceive and interpret the world we inhabit. This process is always shaped by cultural background, education, imagination, philosophy, emotional state, and individual identity, or sense of belonging.

Reflecting on how dramatically the planet has changed in his lifetime, he continues to examine shifting concepts of nature and artifice from a post-utopian, post–science fiction perspective. The dynamic process of civilization—or, as the 20th-century German sociologist Norbert Elias termed it, the “civilizing process”—appears to him as both rapidly evolving and simultaneously unraveling.

His overall stance is undogmatic and skeptical of narratives that position technology as the sole driver of progress. Having worked with digital media for decades, he regards digital technology not as a field or a set of tools, but as an institutionalized infrastructure whose presence is largely unavoidable, yet—like any other cultural framework or institution—must be questioned.

As an artist, he is committed to creating authentic, emotionally resonant experiences—works that may initially appear strange or disorienting, yet continue to engage audiences long after the encounter. 


Photo: Martin Steffen