Andrea Geyer (b. 1971, Freiburg, Germany ; lives and works in New York, USA)

Feeding the Ghosts (2019)
Installation, sound (60 min), variable dimensions

“You cannot uninvite the ghosts.” Slide projectors sit on stacks of books, surrounding two writing tables holding a lamp, a teapot and a cup. Directed outward, the projectors cast blank frames of light of different hues. The sixty-minute, looped voice-over is inspired by Chantal Akerman’s “A Family in Brussels,” a live performance staged in New York in the Fall of 2001. Geyer, a young artist in attendance, was deeply impacted by the work. Like Akerman’s original text, Geyer’s voice-over shifts subject positions throughout the narration between the narrative’s protagonists, to Akerman, and to Geyer herself, weaving their experiences across time into each other. Geyer works from Akerman’s original performance text, as well as interviews with the late artist and her writings on family, history, and memory, and adds her own writing on similar topics. The text is both an homage to the original work and takes it as a directive to think cross-generationally. The voice-over layers the predecessor over the present-day artist, reviving repressed histories they each address in their work. A liminal space is opened between the personal and the political, between presence and absence. For OFFSCREEN, Geyer reconceived the work as a site-specific installation within the archive architecture of Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière.

Andrea Geyer is a New York-based artist who maintains a cross-disciplinary, research-based practice encompassing photography, printmaking, video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Her work engages the material poetics of storytelling as both method and inquiry and examines socially, culturally, and historically significant individuals, events, and sites. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2018), Creative Time Global Residency (2013), Museum of Modern Art Research Fellowship (2011–12), and Art Matters / Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). Selected institutional solo exhibitions include Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2019); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015). Selected group exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2025); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2010); São Paulo Biennial (2010); and documenta 12, Kassel (2007). Her works are held in collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Neue Galerie, Kassel; and the Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, among others.

Zander Galerie, founded in Cologne in 1996, presents expanded photography alongside conceptual and media-based art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Through six to nine exhibitions annually, international art fair participation, and collaborations with museums, institutions, and partner galleries, the gallery fosters dialogues across artistic generations and disciplines. Zander Galerie advises private and institutional collections and publishes monographs and catalogues. In 2023, the gallery opened a gallery space in Paris.