Yvon Chabrowski deals with the visual formulas of contemporary media which she removes from their context. This way, her works convey an awareness of the grammar and life of ubiquitous images in the media, which seem equally familiar and foreign. Using methods of artistic research and performative strategies, Chabrowski examines images circulating in the media in relation to bodies and transforms them into expansive video sculptures combining photography, installation and performative art, thus allowing different perspectives and narratives. In terms of content, her works deal with current debates and social processes, as well as with media-specific questions such as: To what extent can still or moving images be part of a collective visual memory? Do these images remain recognisable despite the contextual displacement, the reduction or enlargement, and do they open up at the same time new contexts and spaces for thought? In her photographic work SEA PIECES I-IV from 2014-2015, the water surface shows disturbances or traces of intervention by the artist. The movement of the waves freezes, but something lies beneath the calming marine blue. Something that should be suppressed remains visible in an uncanny way, thus gaining strength. Here Chabrowski is processing the actual pictorial theme – refugees in the Mediterranean – and the feeling of threat, repression, and habituation with the help of photography, inherent in the dialectic of showing and concealing. In an unusual way of viewing, the video sculpture HORIZONTAL enables a physical, almost intimate experience of closeness, beauty and well-being vis-à-vis the aging female body, marginalised in the visual economy of the present.

Born in East Berlin, Yvon Chabrowski studied photography at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) and fine arts at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon in 2004, followed by numerous national and international exhibitions, residencies and scholarships. In recent years she has shown solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Rostock (2019), Kunstverein Ruhr (2022), won the 7th International Marianne Brandt Competition and published her catalogue VIDEO AS SCULPTURE. Chabrowski lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig.