Halina Kliem is a Berlin-born, Los Angeles-based artist, photographer, and educator whose work asks a simple question: what is actually happening in the world around us that we can't see?
For the past four years she has been developing Through Borrowed Eyes, an ongoing series of film installations and photographs that use imaging technologies originally developed for medicine, engineering, and scientific research to reveal invisible biological vibrations in plant life, water, and air. Pointed at Los Angeles' last remaining natural spaces, the Ballona Wetlands, the LA River, the Santa Monica Mountains, her camera reveals a world in constant, hidden motion: leaves breathing, water pulsing with thermal currents, the air displaced by a passing bee. The resulting images, which she calls Frequograms, sit between scientific imaging, photography, and abstract painting. They are documents of a living world we might drive past without seeing.
Her work doesn't live in galleries. It shows on windows in Old Montreal, on water in a Berlin rainwater basin, in the architecture of modernist houses and public spaces. She believes that art belongs in the places where life actually happens — and that slowing down to look at those places carefully is one of the most radical things right now.
Halina came to Los Angeles from Berlin, a city she grew up in divided, and watched those borderlands change. That experience of those lines and their dissolution runs through everything she makes. The boundary between human and non-human perception. Between the visible and the invisible. Between the city and the wild spaces it surrounds.
Her work has been shown internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum London, Pace Gallery New York, Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz, Floating University Berlin, Goethe-Institut Montreal, and Small Works San Francisco, among others. A limited edition of seven Frequograms, Vibrations, is in production with Lapis Press, Los Angeles, supported by the Alexander Tutsek Foundation, Munich. Her films are distributed by The Film-Makers' Cooperative, New York.
She holds an MFA from the University of the Arts, Berlin, and studied at the Academy of the Arts, Hamburg, and Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts, Pittsburgh.
