K A I . L O S S G O T T

Transdisciplinary visual artist

BIOGRAPHY

Visual artist Kai Lossgott works across media, investigating the inner workings of the human body and the personal element in green politics, most often in video, drawing and poetry. These works co-exist in a precarious tension between the natural (silence and neural sensitivity) and the cultural (language and information systems). Kai has been widely exhibited in South Africa as a finalist for numerous South African art awards such at the Sasol New Signatures, ABSA L'Atelier Awards, Brett Kebble Awards and Thami Mnyele Awards since 2004. The artist is represented in a number of top corporate and museum art collections both at home and abroad. He has exhibited video installations in Sweden, Italy and the USA, and been screened extensively at international museum and gallery events, as well as film festivals. In 2010 in Naples, he was a recipient of the Magmart Video Festival Award.

The artist is also known for his public performance collaborations on the Spier Contemporary 2007, Infecting the City 2009, the Badilisha Poetry X-change 2009, Cape 09, and Out The Box 2010. He is the curator of the CITY BREATH Festival of Video Poetry and Performance (2010), initiating and bringing together short interdisciplinary and experimental films from four South African cities. A selection was screened at the British Film Institute in London in May 2010, followed by various screenings in Europe, South Africa and North America, to popular and critical acclaim. In association with the COPART collective, he is curating LETTERS FROM THE SKY, an experimental film programme for the COP17 global climate summit in Durban in November 2011.

Kai's poetry has been published in various South African journals. In 2011, he launched a book of poetry and visual art, 'talking to the tree outside my window while I sleep', concurrent with his exhibition in the Project Room at La Grande Provence during the Franschoek Literary Festival. The book features texts and images he has engraved into the living tissue of plant leaves over the past four years, investigating the personal element in green politics.

Kai Lossgott holds a BJourn from Rhodes University (specialising in documentary filmmaking and dance theatre), an Advanced Diploma in Visual Arts from UNISA, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, all three cum laude. He has written and edited tertiary coursework and lectured at various South African universities, as well as facilitating community arts initiatives. German by birth (1980), South African by upbringing, Lossgott currently lives and works in Cape Town.

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