A Living Artwork
The film A Living Artwork documents an artistic research process that explores what it means for a work of art to be alive. The starting point is Sonja Bäumel’s biological art, which continually evolves through close engagement with science, the history of medicine, philosophy, and experimental forms of publication.
A living artwork grows, changes, and decays. It develops over time, demands care, calls for attention to the present moment, and makes transformation visible. Working with living matter opens up new perspectives on art. It shifts the focus from static forms to processes and makes growth, transience, fragility and unpredictability the very substance of the work.

A Living Artwork follows Sonja Bäumel, medical historian Birgit Nemec, cultural analyst Jules Sturm, and artist Janina Krepart as they engage in a series of interventions and performances exploring the concept of the “living” in art. The film follows its protagonists between Vienna, Amsterdam, and Berlin, documenting their research as part of an evolving work in progress. At the same time, the film forms the basis for the final project of this research: the interactive installation A Living Puppet.

A Living Puppet
A Living Puppet invites you to understand the human body not as a self-contained entity, but rather as a living being in relation to its environment.

The starting point is a central paradox of anatomy: for centuries, knowledge about life has been conveyed through dead bodies. The installation draws on the beginnings of anatomical visualisation, taking as its reference the woodcut-illustrated 1543 work De humani corporis fabrica by the anatomist and surgeon Andreas Vesalius. A Living Puppet seeks to create alternative ways of imagining human embodiment. It challenges culturally shaped perspectives that regard the human body as a self-contained entity and reimagines it as a life-sized, movable marionette whose body parts are made of printed textiles.

Using a pulley system, you can work together to set the seemingly lifeless object in motion. The installation makes tangible the idea that life is not a property of an isolated body, but rather emerges through relationships, movements, and mutual dependencies.

A Living Puppet thus challenges traditional anatomical notions and shifts the focus away from individual organs towards the connections between body, environment, and other living beings. The work opens up new ways of thinking about human embodiment as something changeable, process-oriented, and deeply interconnected.

Text by Sonja Bäumel
Sonja Bäumel is an artist, Eddie Bolger a documentary filmmaker, Janina Krepart an art educator, Birgit Nemec a medical historian, and Jules Sturm a philosopher and cultural analyst.