Villa Waldberta
Sarah Messerschmidt
October – December 2022


Sarah Messerschmidt is a writer who works across anthropology, art, and critical theory. Her current research examines nonfiction and artists’ films as ways of representing experience, particularly those that respond to legacies of colonialism. Looking at moving image practices as methods of reinvention and world-making, she is interested in the mediation of memory via footage, taking into consideration the politics of representation and relations of power in image making, while also considering film and video as insurgent media capable of establishing political and social solidarity. Her inquiries also consider the ways in which film can merge fiction with research, cultural analysis, and critique in order to draw out complex ideas about the relationships between visual culture, power and colonial violence. Messerschmidt is a graduate of the University of Glasgow, and was later a resident of the Maumaus Independent Study Programme in Lisbon. She regularly contributes essays and written texts to exhibition catalogues, journals, and magazines internationally, including Artforum, Art Monthly UK, Texte zur Kunst, and Third Text, among others.