Michaela Melián

Michaela Melián (born 1956 in Munich) is both an artist and a musician. She combines photographs, films, music and texts to create large-scale installations or audiovisual projects whose reciprocal references have a profound effect on the socio-political and contemporary historical context. Melián links historical facts with personal memories, searches for places, and finds motifs where history and memory are condensed.

For her Panorama series – inspired by the Innsbruck Rundgemälde (circular painting), one of the last existing panoramas of the 19th century – Melián photographed the landscape in and around Innsbruck during a car ride. From each photograph, the artist made a drawing whose contours she did not trace with pen or brush, but sewed stitch by stitch with a sewing machine. A continuous thread runs around the silhouettes of mountains, roads, trees and buildings.

Michaela Melián taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, at ETH Zurich’s Department of Art and Architecture, and from 2006 to 2008 as a visiting professor at HFBK Hamburg (Hamburg University of Fine Arts), where she has held a professorship for time-related media since 2010. For her work, she received the Art Prize of the City of Munich in 2010 and the Art Prize of the City of Nordhorn in 2011. A monographic exhibition of her work was shown at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (Lenbachhaus art gallery) in 2016.