Barbara Kiener

Kiener was born in Interlaken in 1979. After her career as a top athlete in the Swiss alpine ski team until 1999, she developed into a selftaught artist in the fields of painting, performance, action art and installations.
Through sport, Kiener has internalized the ability to focus with an unbroken will and a goal in mind, to bring her body, senses and mind into harmony with the performance at hand, to pave an individual path, to engage unconditionally with the respective conditions and to train persistently and grow at the
expense of personal freedom.
Qualities that also apply to art: Where it places its focus on the wounds of the times,
where it holistically and excessively directs its concentration on the respective situation on site, where the body uncompromisingly serves the artistic idea, where personal freedoms are subordinated to communal concerns an_d socio-critical messages. Kiener’s style in each of her works is one that shapes the downward pull of this society into a naturally curved momentum, which is then released from the tension as a well-measured blow, only to gain momentum in the next moment for the next change of direction, which has the meaningfulness of the goings-on of this world as its theme more strongly than before.