Mario Kiesenhofer
Selected works
Mario Kiesenhofer
Mario Kiesenhofer works with photography, video, text and installation. He focuses on queer spaces and communities, with an emphasis on their representation and visibility, examining how queer safe spaces are constituted and how they evolve and resist. His work deals with the dispositive of photography and how it sharpens the gaze onto realities that are not perceived as such. Tinted filters, special framing techniques and reflective surfaces are inherent components of the artist’s work, adding to the formal and conceptual complexity of each piece. By combining them with his photographs, he creates lens-based objects that are both tangible and intangible, physical and metaphysical.
Mario Kiesenhofer (*1984 in Freistadt, Austria) lives and works in Vienna. He studied Photography and Video Art under the guidance of Matthias Herrmann and Dorit Margreiter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including recent solo shows at Bank Austria Kunstforum Vienna (2023/24), the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw (2024) and Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York (2022). Kiesenhofer has received several photography scholarships, including the 2023 Austrian State Scholarship for Photography and a scholarship for Artistic Photography in New York City in 2018 (as part of the International Studio & Curatorial Program). He was awarded a special mention by the expert jury at the Portfolio Review at Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2020. EIKON Magazine and C/O Vienna Magazine have recently published his work.
Photos (c) Mario Kiesenhofer