Born in the year of the goat and in the month of the scorpion Elke Marhöfer, is an artist based in Berlin and Sicily. She is investigates ecological practices that support human and nonhuman communities. Elke collaborates with dear friends and things and revises concepts of animals, vegetables and objects. She works with notions of self-admitted foreignness and radical othering. Linking, for example, the nonhuman with the postcolonial, she discusses how nature evokes situated testimonies of past and current events while simultaneously surpassing historical formatting, with its unique and machinic mode of constantly mutating into something new. She tests nonhuman perspectives, translating a technology like the camera from a human cultural and technical device into an environmentally intensive force. In this way, the camera becomes a tool principally undifferentiated from nonhuman animal tools and filming becomes akin to orangutans using leaves to make squeaky kiss noises.
Elke studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin, at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. She was awarded a PhD by the University of Gothenburg and pursued an international post-doc at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Global Environment Studies.
Her films have been screened at the Cinematek Brussels, Stockholm, Toronto and Tokyo and at festivals like the transmediale, BFI-Film Festival London, Berlinale – Internationale Filmfestspiele, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival Ghent and Images Film Festival Toronto.
Her work has been presented in numerous institutions including Berlinische Gallerie, Biennale of Urbanism Shenzhen, The Showroom, Badischer Kunstverein, Kyiv Biennale, Kaohsiung Museum Taipei, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Manufactura’s Studio Wuhan, FCAC Shanghai, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, NGBK Berlin, Kunstverein Hannover and Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, among others.
She has received fellowships, and research grants from LIFT (Liaison of International Filmmakers Toronto), Global Prayers (Artist Fellow research grant), IASPIS Residency Sweden, TCG Kunming China Residency, Berlin Senate, Akademie Schloss Solitude and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris.