Marion von Osten

Marion von Osten (born 1963) is an artist, curator, researcher, organizer-facilitator, and teacher. She is Honorary Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She works with curatorial, artistic, and theoretical approaches that converge through the medium of exhibitions, installations, video, and text productions. Her main research interests concern cultural production in postcolonial societies, technologies of the self, and the governance of mobility. She is a founding member of Labor k3000 in Zürich and of kleines post-fordistisches Drama (kpD) and the Center for Post-colonial Knowledge and Culture in Berlin. Between 2006 and 2012 she was Professor of Art and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna. From 1999 through 2006 she was Professor of Artistic Practice and researcher at the Institute for the Theory of Art and Design (ith), Zürich University of the Arts, Zürich. She has also lectured at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York and the Critical Studies Program, Malmö Art Academy, Malmö. Prior to that she was curator at Shedhalle Zürich from 1996 to 1999. Recent research and exhibition projects include: Tricontinentale.net, Center for Post-Colonial Knowledge and Culture, Berlin, 2014; Model House—Mapping Transcultural Modernisms, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, 2010–2013; Architectures of Decolonization, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris, 2011–2012; The American Home, Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2011; In the Desert of Modernity—Colonial Planning and After, Les Abattoirs de Casablanca, Casablanca, 2009 and House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2008; Projekt Migration, Cologne, 2002–2006; and TRANSIT MIGRATION, Zürich, Frankfurt, and Cologne, 2003–2005. Von Osten lives and works in Berlin. [Last updated 2016]

16 November 2020 
IN MEMORY OF MARION VON OSTEN 

We at BAK are deeply saddened that Marion von Osten has left this world. We are indebted to Marion for all she has taught us, and for the honor of working closely together with us on many occasions over more than a decade.

In the introduction to the publication Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artists (A BAK Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice, 2017), Maria Hlavajova sums up a few of the attributes that made Marion such an extraordinary artist, thinker, and person whose life has touched so many: 

 “As an artist, feminist, organizer, curator, friend, collaborator, editor, lecturer, writer, researcher, participant, educator, comrade—in no particular order, the list could go on—von Osten’s is a practice that is as significant for the field of art and beyond as it is complex to unpack. Although never standing alone and always in relation, her cultural work has been key in shaping the practice of art that is the public sphere and political space.”

Her intellectual brilliance, generosity, and commitment to a radically transversal artistic practice and other pathways of making culture compels us to go on with all that she strived and lived for.

Thank you for everything Marion. You will be forever missed.