Karin Schäfer

Collage Art & Visual Theatre

living with two passions in life

In addition to her theater productions, which have taken her to guest performances and festivals in 45 countries worldwide, Karin Schäfer has increasingly focused on her visual art in recent years.

While her productions have always been situated at the intersection of performing and visual arts, she now takes her stories from the stage and brings them directly onto and into her images—combining her passion for travel with her love for maps, atlases, patterns, and shapes.

The central approach in her work (both in theater and visual art) is always the technique of collage—the disassembly, compilation, and combination of elements from different contexts and their integration into new perspectives, scenes, actions, and images. Her current series SEAmaps, SEAcrets, and SEAngles are based on world maps and nautical cartography from the historical era to the present.

They merge a love for the sea, a fascination with ships, containers, and harbors with a passion for travel and the joy of "getting lost"—in foreign places, past times, somewhere between cities, countries, islands, and oceans.

After working in Barcelona, Neusiedl am See and Malaga, she is currently living and working again in Vienna, Austria.