Henrik Nieratschker
PhD candidate in the Binational Artistic Phd Program at HfK Bremen (University of the arts Bremen) in cooperation with PhDArts at Universiteit Leiden and KABK in The Hague (NL)
Henrik Nieratschker studied Digital Media and Fine Arts at the University of Arts Bremen and Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London.
Henrik’s artistic practice is concerned with a critical view of contemporary life amidst digital infrastructure. Artistic outputs include moving images, sound, graphics, objects, performances, software, and hardware, which often come together in the form of extended media installations.
Henrik is co-founder of the artist collective and record label Research and Waves, which develops record releases, exhibitions, and experimental events at the intersections of sound art practice, curating, and artistic research.
Henrik’s work has been awarded and exhibited internationally, including a Core77 Design Award; and exhibitions at Victoria & Albert Museum and Arebyte Gallery, London, UK; Science Gallery, Dublin, IE; 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo, JP; Urbane Künste Ruhr with House for the History of the Ruhr, Bochum, DE; Aalto University, Helsinki, FIN; and Personal Structures Bienal, Venice, IT. Henrik has worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Kyoto Institute of Technology and the University of Arts Bremen, where Henrik currently holds a fellowship.
henriknieratschker.earth
Selected Exhibitions (Group, Solo, Collective and everything inbetween)
2025
Urban Speculations: Cities, Technologies, Futures
Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University / Lüneburg
2024
nearly all types of honey crystallize
GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst / Bremen
2023
from the archives. Künstler*innen im Archiv
Urbane Künste Ruhr & Haus der Geschichte des Ruhrgebiets / Bochum
The Art of Research
Aalto University Gallery / Helsinki
Words 4 Vinyl [~ Research and Waves]
RaumPro / Bremen
2022
Narrating the Gaps
Künstler:innenhaus Bremen
Halbe Halbe - Floating in, Swerving out, Doing Art and Theory.
Dauerwelle / Bremen
2021
i can‘t hear you 1-5 [~ Research and Waves]
Changing Room / Berlin
2020
YouFab Awards Exhibition
QWS / Tokyo
2019
Transparencies [~ Research and Waves]
Feldfuenf / Berlin
2018
Design Questions 3
3331 Arts Chiyoda / Tokyo
2017
Water
Copeland Gallery / London
2016
Heal the World
Neues Museum Weserburg / Bremen
Ethnography in the Expanded Field
Parsons / New York
2015
What is Luxury?
Victoria & Albert Museum / London
LifeLogging Lab [w/ Marcel Helmer as proto/meta]
Science Gallery / Dublin
2014
The New Digital Archaeologists [w/ Marcel Helmer as proto/meta]
Brighton Media Centre / Brighton
Next Brave New World
Arebyte Gallery / London
Selected Talks, Lectures, Workshops & Performances
2024
The Joy of Stacking Packages 4.0 [Work Performance]
Scenes of Transformation and Resistance: Performing in Artistic Research / Personal Structures Bienal / Venice
Geschichtung2: Black Flags [Performative Reading]
Symposion: Documenting in Artistic Rearch / GAK / Bremen
2023
Geschichtung: Working Towards a Practice of Political Re-Imaginings [Talk]
The Art of Research Conference 8 / Aalto University / Helsinki
After Work Conversations #1 & #2 [Moderation + Workshop]
University of Arts / Bremen & Royal Academy of Art / The Hague
2022
Geschichting / Wellen [Soundwalk w/ Norman Neumann]
Künstler:innenhaus / Bremen
Sort, Scan, Stack, Repeat: The Shipping Warehouse ... [Talk]
ARBEIT — Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft / Universität Halle
The Joy of Stacking Packages [Work Performance]
& On Armchair Socialists [Lecture Performance]
Halbe Halbe / Dauerwelle & GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst / Bremen
2018
Transparencies: 3 (or 6) Definitions ... [Lecture Performance]
Galerie Mitte / Bremen
2015
Digital Futures: DeLuxe Edition [Panel Discussion]
Victoria & Albert Museum / London
2014
Next Brave New World - Dinner Discussions [Food + Debate]
Arebyte Gallery & The Yard / London
Residencies
2022
Zu Gast bei ...
Urbane Künste Ruhr & Haus der Geschichte des Ruhrgebiets / Bochum
2017-18
D-Lab Design Associate Program
D-Lab / Kyoto Institute of Technology / Kyoto
2014
A Stroll Through a Fun Palace
Swiss Pavillon / Architecture Bienal / Venice
Selected Awards and Stipends
2021-25 Promotionsstipendium – Studienstiftung des Dt. Volkes
2019 YouFab Global Creative Award [Finalist]
2017 Lumen Prize: 3D/Sculpture [Longlist]
2015 Core77 Design Award: Speculative Concepts [Winner -Student Category]
2012-15 Stipendium Kunst und Design – Studienstiftung des Dt. Volkes
Selected Publications
Nieratschker, Henrik. “Arbeit = Arbeit? – Zur Situation zwischen Kunst- und Lohnarbeit im Kontext von Automatisierung und Postkapitalismus“ In Künstlerische Arbeit, edited by Christiane Heibach, Friederike Nastold and Irene Schütze. Weimar: VDG, 2025. [Forthcoming]
Nieratschker, Henrik and Dennis Paul (ed.). Fictions, Speculations & Imaginaries. Bremen: The Dynamic Archive, 2025.
Nieratschker, Henrik. “Document(s) → Documenting → Imagining: Black Flags, Grids, and an Indexical Imagination“ In nearly all types of honey crystallize: Documenting in Artistic Research, 78-105. Bremen: The Dynamic Archive, 2024.
Nieratschker, Henrik. Toying Around: -archies, -cracies & -isms. Bremen, 2021. [Self-published]
Nieratschker, Henrik. “Minusplusplus.“ In The 3D Additivist Cookbook, edited by Daniel Rourke and Moreshin Allahyari, 48-51. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2017.
(Sound) Installation
2022
Henrik Nieratschker's work Geschichtung 1: Am Deich 68-69 Bremen examines the parallels between the artistic, commercial, freelance, and salaried work performed under the roof. He brings together the current function as an artists' house with the building's previous uses for example as a spice and lumber shop in an autofictional narrative. His installation consists of an edited archival image and four objects whose arrangement references the image: a ladder, a sack truck, a platform cart, and a shelf. Attached to each of the objects is a panel on which Nieratschker collages/layers archival images, architectural plans, drawings, and texts from different phases of the building we are in. The texts on the panels, titled "Loading Dock / Laderampe" "Restaurant/Basement / Restaurant/Keller" "Attic / Unterm Dach" and "Gallery / Galerie", are narratives in which Nieratschker weaves together different temporal layers from the history of the Künstlerhaus. The German texts can be heard in four audio pieces at the objects. Visitors are invited to take the headphones hanging below the archival image and plug them into the headphone jacks located on the objects. In the stories heard there, a complex narrative of the building's use across time emerges, weaving together past, present, and future.
(Exhibition Text by Nadja Quante)
The work was commissioned by Kuenstlerhaus Bremen for the exhibition "Narrating the Gaps" on the occasion of the artist studio and gallery building's 30th anniversary in 2022.
*Installation views photographed by Fred Dott for Künstlerhaus Bremen.
Interactive Video Essay / Installation
2022
Based on the artist's personal experience as a package handler, the video essay / installation presents a personal, audio-visual archive of memories that illustrate the day-to-day of working in a shipping warehouse. The physical and computational environments of the warehouse are deconstructed, extrapolated, and partly reassembled in form and function to become a narrative device, speaking to the realities of (manual) labor in a digital condition.
The audience is invited to use this device, pick up the scanner themselves, and scan the barcodes on the packages in order to trigger one of the 27 recordings of fragmented, spoken memories that inhabit the empty space of the 3D-animated computer model of the warehouse seen in the video.
Performance (aprox. 8 min)
2022
The configuration of packages in the installation is renewed on several performative occasions during the time of the exhibition.
The performance takes place approximately 20-30 minutes after the opening of the exhibition each day, except for the last day of the exhibition, when the artist will have quit his job.
Ebook and Print-on-Demand Self-Publication
2019
Is democracy failing us?
The publication presents a short essay in interpretation of the press coverage of protests during the 2017 US presidential inauguration that poses this very question. In search of an answer, we encounter a collection of Wikipedia articles in the second half of the book, showcasing a wide variety of forms of government and social organisation. From Matriarchy to Technocracy to Despotism, engaging with the theories and histories of these -archies, -cracies and -isms might help us to identify ways to move forward with democracies in crisis.
Lecture Performance, Essay Draft, Transparent Backpack, Acrylic and Ink on Paper, Work Gloves, Scanning Device Holster
2018
... FROM A PERSPECTIVE OF NETWORKED AND STANDARDISED LABOUR
From the essay:
It all began as a mistake. In the summer and fall of 2018, I spent 6 months working as a package handler for one of the world's largest shipping companies. What started as an act of desperation, rents are rising and making art doesn't always pay off, soon became a sort of undercover mission. As I was loading, moving and sorting packages, I became fascinated with the complex interplay of the workers, their powered equipment and an ever-present corporate technobureaucracy. The shipping warehouse is a stage on which a common state of our technologised society becomes visible in its showings of raw consumption and digitally enhanced, physical labour. The scenes of interpersonal, post digital, micro and macroeconomical tragedy and comedy I have witnessed will continue to take shape within my work for the coming year or more, but for today I will highlight 3 of them in search for definitions of the term Transparency.
A small collection of objects illustrates the key points of the essay in a tangible and immediate way.
Fictional Company
2015/16
Minusplusplus is a fictional Silicon Valley start-up, developing products which reflect upon the shortcomings of a technologically induced "better world" promised by the Californian ideology that is spreading from Silicon Valley around the globe. The company is run as a multi-platform art and research project, appropriating advertisement and corporate language to engage with overlooked cultural, social, and political roles of (digital) technology and works towards prototyping alternatives in the space between art, technology, activism and
startup culture.
Minusplusplus comes fluidly into existence through installations, lectures, artistic experiments and design prototypes, as well as its online presence.
Visit: Minusplusplus Official Website
*Installation views photographed by Franziska von den Driesch.