Kora Riecken
Lore, 2025
5-channel sound installation, active loudspeaker, quarry stone, wood, ash
Speakers: Luna Hepper, Jonas Säverin, Jerome Scheuren, Jakob Stöger, Luna Vega
Cut: Tilli Treier
17 min
Courtesy the artist
Kora Riecken (b. 1997, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) is currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mainz. Her work combines video, audio, performance, and installation, all of which stem from her writing practice. She explores themes of female melancholy, intimacy, and solitude.
Often presented as video installations, Riecken focuses on specific bodily actions or scenes, detaching them from their original contexts and investing them with new narrative force. These fragments initially appear familiar, as they reflect everyday experiences and common visual habits. Yet Riecken deconstructs these sequences, isolates them, and shifts them into focus, thereby assigning them a new symbolic meaning. They become markers that can stand in for the mood of an entire generation. Her works are intimate, fragile images—seemingly private, yet conveying a collective atmosphere without grand gestures.
In her video pieces, Riecken frequently employs the artistic strategy of recombining disparate elements. Mundane gestures, nondescript locations, and minimal actions are brought together in surprising ways, opening up new associative and occasionally absurd spaces of resonance. This method recalls the video snippets common on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where everyday life is told in fragments. However, Riecken deliberately avoids any sense of spectacle. She adopts uncomfortable perspectives and presents moments of intimate withdrawal—scenes that often take place in the private or hidden realm. Her focus is on places imbued with melancholic moods. Through this, her fragmented world narratives speak to emotional needs for retreat and human connection.
For the exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Kora Riecken has created a spatial sound installation. She wrote a text, which was read aloud by various speakers, and which is heard in rotation from several separate placed in a circle—surrounding a central, imaginary campfire.
Riecken has long been interested in the power of oral storytelling. True crime narratives have gained global resonance through the internet. The primal human practice of myth-making and the telling of urban legends continues to fascinate her. In numerous online forums, this form of communal storytelling flourishes. One prevailing rule governs these spaces: no story, regardless of how fantastical, may be questioned. This creates a kind of sanctuary, a protected space to which all participants commit.
The campfire, as a moment of suspension in time, the nightly gathering in its glow, and the sharing of stories, forms the core of Riecken’s installation. It sets the emotional tone. Drawing on this ancient practice of oral narration, Riecken treats language as a space of possibility—a place to reflect on both reality and fiction.
Kora Riecken (b. 1997, Frankfurt am Main, DE) has been studying since 2019 at the Kunsthochschule Mainz (DE) in the Media Arts class under Prof. Dieter Kiessling. Her work encompasses video, installation, and a literary-text-based practice. She explores themes such as female melancholy, intimate spaces, and the discomfort that permeates these realms. By using her body as a narrative element, her artistic work investigates the role of autofiction and the boundary between person and personal, self- and external perception.
Her short stories have received awards and been published in various anthologies. In 2022 and 2023, Kora Riecken was a finalist for the hr2 Literature Prize. Her works have been shown in institutions such as documenta Halle, Kassel (DE), Basis Projektraum, Frankfurt am Main (DE), Kunstverein Trier Junge Kunst (DE), and Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden (DE). In 2024, Riecken was a fellow of the “Summer Summit” Residency at the Stiftung Insel Hombroich, as well as the Deutschlandstipendium.
