Kari Robertson (she/her b.1988, Edinburgh) is an artist, researcher, teacher, collaborator and sometimes writer living and working in Rotterdam. She graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute MA in 2016. Alongside her research lecturer position she also teaches on New Earth in Social Practice at WDKA.
In Kari’s solo practice she works with time-based media, primarily sound, analogue film and digital video. Recently she has also worked with mutable, melting or unstable materials in sculpture, such as milk, beeswax and water. Her works often deal with questions of subjectivity and complex natureculture entanglements. In both her research and broader practice Kari interrogates questions of boundaries, purity politics and perceptions of toxicity, looking for alternatives to the Western conceptions of the individual and social body. Recently she has shown at Available and The Rat, Growing Space and Showroom Mama in Rotterdam as well as at CRISPR in Bogota, Colombia. In 2020/21 she completed a writing commission for School of Commons (Zurich) and in 2019 was a resident at Mondriaanfonds’ Deltaworkers residency in New Orleans.
Kari is part of the facilitative platform GHOST with Madison Bycroft and Natalia Sorzano who are currently completing an ambitious multi-dimensional ‘album’ project in collaboration with De P/Layer Rotterdam. Previously GHOST hosted a reading group on Improvisation, Opacity and Policing (the ideas of Eduoard Glissant) in collaboration with Tender Centre Rotterdam.
Kari also plays in improvisational/ experimental band ‘Difficult’ with Tracy Hanna and Eothan Stearn. Most recently they were commissioned to produce the music for ‘I hope this message finds you well’ podcast and together they are currently writing their ‘difficult second album’.