English Biography

Carsten Schneider – Word, Image and Sound

Carsten Schneider (b. 1971, Bad Oldesloe, Germany) works at the intersection of language, image and sound. Using headlines, conjunctions and fragments of everyday speech, he builds large-scale newspaper collages and original-sound compositions that turn the residues of daily media into long-term memory. Since the 1990s he has been collecting and classifying hundreds of thousands of newspaper cuttings and radio recordings; from this archive his word pictures, colour fields and radio pieces slowly grow.


In his newspaper collages Schneider often concentrates on a single word field: “and”, “nothing”, “dream”, “word”, or the article “die”, which in German marks a noun but in English reads as “to die”. Over many years he assembles hundreds or thousands of almost identical finds from one newspaper into dense visual poems. Mounted in several layers on cardboard, the cuttings form relief-like text surfaces in which language becomes material – somewhere between concrete poetry, painting and media archaeology.


Parallel to his visual work Schneider composes original-sound radio plays and sound pieces, in particular the long-term series Die Konstruktion des Deutschlandfunks (“Constructing Deutschlandfunk”). For these works he records days, weeks or even years of broadcasting, cuts them into breaths, syllables, pauses and noises, and recomposes them into tightly woven sound texts. Image and sound are conceived as siblings: many collages have an “acoustic counterpart” that is built from the same word field or collection principle.


Schneider also writes theatre texts and short prose and has created plays for municipal and state theatres as well as for independent ensembles. In his theatrical and literary work he often pursues the same questions as in his visual and acoustic pieces: How can language, image and sound translate into one another? How do everyday media – the newspaper, the radio – become material for poetry?


Short biography

  • Born 1971 in Bad Oldesloe (Schleswig-Holstein), grew up in Rendsburg; lives and works in Berlin.
  • Studied Applied Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice at the University of Hildesheim (Literature/Theatre/Media, minor in Music), diploma in 1997.
  • Since 2000 working as a freelance artist: author of more than 25 theatre plays and numerous short stories, creator of newspaper collages and original-sound radio plays.
  • Solo exhibitions and larger presentations include Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Poesiefestival), St. Matthäus Foundation, Berlin, and various galleries in Hildesheim, Berlin, Zehdenick and Brussels.
  • His radio works have received several awards and prizes and have been broadcast by Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and other public radio stations.
  • Artist residency: Schloss Wiepersdorf (composer’s residency, 2023)


Contact

For detailed information, portfolios and current projects please visit
 www.carstenschneider-kunst.de · mail@carstenschneider-kunst.de