Koebel as Boo Boo in Spectres of the Spectrum (2000) directed by Craig Baldwin
"The poetic power of Koebel's filmmaking is rather like Anna Akhmatova speaking about those political disturbances she cannot get away from, political thoughts breaking into daily productions." —Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Curator of "Drift and Dwell"
Caroline Koebel is an artist, writer and curator whose early love of experimental cinema and coming of age in a vibrant punk scene are touchstones for her travels near and far. Her films, videos and multi-platform artworks clash aesthetics and politics and catalyze dialogic relations between self and other, sound and image, matter and language, rhythm and duration, and analog and digital realms. Her projects—ranging in topic from early cinema and the maternal body through commodity culture and geopolitics to interrelations between humans and nature—discover autonomous spaces and invent radical toolkits enabling sustained and revelatory contemplation of the spectator's pivotal role in the world.
Retrospectives include Festival Cine//B (Chile), the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle (Poland) and Directors Lounge (Germany), and in 2015 Young Projects in Los Angeles ran her solo show Incursions Into Cosmic Fear. Additional venues include Anthology Film Archives and Scope Art Fair (NYC), MadCat (San Francisco), Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland), dança em foco/dance in focus (Brazil), Bangkok Experimental Film Fest (Thailand), Ladyfest Toronto (Canada), European Media Art Festival (Germany), Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film & Video Festival (Malaysia), Camagüey Festival of Video Art (Cuba), and LOOP Barcelona (Spain). Her video Flying Saucer Drone, commissioned by the Magmart Festival (Italy), has toured to more than 25 countries, including Armenia, Algeria, Brazil, China, Greece, India, Iran, Philippines, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.
Support has been given by such entities as New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Experimental Television Center, Austin Film Society, the Kodak Award, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Artists' Space, Media Alliance, and CEPA Gallery.
She's written catalog essays on Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Andres Tapia-Urzua, and has also published in Art Papers, Brooklyn Rail, Jump Cut, OtherZine, Glasstire, Afterimage, Millennium Film Journal, Wide Angle, and the Swedish journal OEI, as well as co-authored the acclaimed stencil graffiti book Schablone Berlin for Chax Press. Her writing has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Curatorial projects journey from The Friendship State: Texas Experimental Filmmakers and Kino B: Contemporary Cinema by Berlin-based Artists, through various programs as a board member of the Film-Makers' Cooperative as well as Body Hold Out Fest and Inventing Space of Cinema, to Forum on Torture, featuring journalist Amy Goodman, new media artist Eddo Stern, art critic David Levi Strauss, and philosopher Newton Garver.
In addition to higher education, Koebel has worked at such cultural spaces as Performance Space 122, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Program for Art on Film (a joint venture of the Getty Trust and the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Museum of the Moving Image, and the Andy Warhol Museum. On faculty at Transart Institute, Koebel's courses in Berlin include "Looking for Foxes: Wild Urbanity" and "Alienation Effect: We Get Brecht." She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego, and is currently raising a tween in Columbus, Ohio.