Halina Kliem is a time-based media artist, photographer, and educator who has worked internationally. She created expanded film installations, durational projects, and lead workshops in various countries, including Israel, Argentina, Australia, China, Iceland, Italy, France, Germany, Canada, and the US.
As a transplant to Los Angeles from Berlin, a formerly divided city, and as an artist whose practice has taken shape across multiple continents, she brings a migratory perspective to her work. A sense of constant flux and movement is her creative engine, and she approaches the moving image as a way to map emotional and environmental geographies, focusing on spaces in transition, especially those on the margins of urban transformation. A continuous desire in her practice is to situate her work outside the white walls of the gallery, creating experiences that intersect directly with our public life and the environments they inhabit. She explores how we move, belong, remember, and reinvent ourselves and our surroundings.
Her often interdisciplinary works have appeared in distinguished institutions, including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Fitzpatrick-Leland House by MAK Center in Los Angeles, Lentos Museum of Modern Art in Linz, Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery in New York, and Pace Gallery in New York.
Her site-specific film installation Films for Crossroads and ongoing project Inside Ballona/Waachnga explore how animals might perceive the world, shifts boundary between human and nonhuman vision, and asks: Can we see the world anew?
Her written-word film Lucid Dreams earned recognition in the European Competition of the festival platform This Is Short. Premiering in the US at the Oscar-qualifying Florida Film Festival, it also showcased at the Bafta-qualifying Carmarthen Bay Film Festival and the Academy Award-qualifying Athens International Film and Video Festival in Athens, Ohio.
Halina’s earlier language-driven short, The Purple Video, debuted at the Florida Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, and San Francisco International Festival of Short Film.
She studied time-based media art and photography at the Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts in Pittsburgh, USA,
and holds a Master of Fine Arts and Visual Culture Studies from Berlin University of the Arts. Mentored by German photographer and filmmaker Katharina Sieverding, she started creating bold, word-powered video installations.
Open-ended single and multi-channel video loops expanded into enveloping audio-visual environments.