Katrina Niebergal

video , Taal , sculptuur , schrijven , keramiek , installatie , film , Experimenteel , Artistiek onderzoek

Katrina Niebergal (she/they) is a Rotterdam-based artist whose practice operates at the intersections of research, filmmaking, and scenographic installation. Increasingly, these modes are converging into long-term world-making projects. Guided by poetic logic, attuned to myth as a living framework, her work focuses on the contested figure of the womanly “irrational,” and on prehistoric and speculative-future epochs as potential times outside patriarchal and capitalist hegemony. These inquiries directly inform her methodology, which combines fluid research processes with material gathering, acts of reinterpretation, and the construction of counter-narratives. Within this framework of method and temporal inquiry, Katrina examines how human technological developments reverberate through culture and society, shaping patterns of knowledge, power, and ways of being. She situates these developments in relation to both mythic structures and lived experience, asking how technologies of the past and future are inscribed within present bodies and politics. Grounded in the ethics of intersectional feminism, her work reflects on her own entanglement within these histories and systems. Across projects, she explores how recognizing such entanglement might enable the cultivation of radical (self-)trust, the recuperation of agency, and the creation of spaces for alternative modes of being.

SF scene-making (laminate)
SF scene-making (laminate) - 2025, laminated paper, inkjet prints, dried flowers, glitter tape, stickers, 21 x 30 cm. This collage (one in a series) emerged from a collaborative scene-making workshop I led at WET's Small Film School (Rotterdam, 2025). Participants worked with printed backgrounds, figures, and objects to speculate on possible scenes, environments, and relations. I later revisited and extended these materials through lamination and the addition of pressed flowers and surface elements, using the process to explore how gesture, atmosphere, and symbolism can be assembled through simple means. The laminates function as exploratory artifacts within an ongoing research trajectory, testing how feminist science fiction can be used as a method for collective imagination and world-building. Rather than depicting finished scenes, they operate as provisional prompts that inform the development of future participatory and cinematic work.
come, Memory: fieldwork
come, Memory: fieldwork - 2023, expanded research-and-sound cassette tape with riso-printed insert/poster (back view) and sleeve, ed. of 50, 29 minutes, 12 seconds, made in collaboration with Bergur Anderson, published by Futura Resistenza, Rotterdam/Brussels. This sound work weaves together field recordings and audio materials gathered throughout the development of come, Memory. It extends the project’s research into the acoustic realm — where sites, spirits, and histories resonate through texture, rhythm, and interference. Serving both as documentation and a parallel artwork, the piece traces a sensory geography of ancient landscapes and speculative mythologies.
Ogygia: testimony to a disappeared civilization - 2023, super 8mm transferred to digital with sound, 9 minutes, 48 ​​seconds. A short, experimental, speculative-fiction film that offers an ethnographic-style account of a remote, semi-fictious land and its mysterious/mythological origins. This film, along with the long-term research and filmmaking project it emerged from, looked speculatively, through embedded, eroded and residual evidence, at the presence/absence of the divine womanly (Great Mother) and at ancient, especially Neolithic (pre-capitalist and pre-patriarchal) sacred sites and human-spiritual-relationships with the Earth.
No talking spring - 2023, super 8mm transferred to digital with sound, 8 minutes, 32 ​​seconds. A short, experimental, speculative fiction film shot in Greece — at the ancient sites of Delphi, Delos, Naxos and Crete— and set in 393 A.D. when the last of the Great Mother cults collapsed in the patriarchal turn. The narrator’s voice is figured as the last oracle of the last Oracle of Delphi.
the great mound (mama) - 2023, super 8mm transferred to digital with sound, 10 minutes, 25 seconds. A short, experimental film that centres around the ancient, Neolithic site of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, UK — the largest human-made prehistoric mound in Europe and part of the is part of the complex of Neolithic monuments around Avebury, including the Avebury Ring. The film looks at the ideas of geo-anatomy and the Earth as sentient/Mother and uses the camera and field-recording form as a somatic process; as an extension of embodied experience.
come, Memory (installation view) - 2023, WET, Rotterdam, May 2023, 3 channel video projection with synchronized sound, Super 8mm color film transferred to digital, glazed and unglazed ceramic, fabric, wood, vinyl window film, found objects, riso-prints, installation dimensions variable. come, Memory brings together moving image, sculptural elements, within a scenographic form to explore myth, memory, and the disappearance of the divine womanly within patriarchal history. Developed through research trips to ancient (especially Neolithic) European sacred sites, the installation extends the project’s three films into physical space — where objects, materials, and images operate as fragments of speculative archaeology. The work reflects on pilgrimages, human–technology entanglements, and feminist (post-capitalist, post-patriarchal) futures. It invites viewers into a site of reconstruction, where real and imagined places converge, and where traces of pre-patriarchal Earth-based cosmologies persist.
(Knight’s) Head
(Knight’s) Head - 2023, coloured stoneware, 72 x 38 x 47 cm. A large ceramic press-moulded sculpture made with (pigment and oxide) coloured clay to resemble a lichen-covered surface. In the installation, come, Memory, this sculpture, along with two others, doubled as seats for viewing the films. The sculpture was inspired by knight’s head artefacts found on the research and filming trip made in advance of the great mound (mama), in the county of Wiltshire, UK.
Cyanotype (comb)
Cyanotype (comb) - 2022, one of a series of 6 cyanotype prints on paper, 20 x 30 cm (each). Cyanotype print made using gathered wild-flowers and found objects. Cyanotype print produced during a research and filming trip to the Avebury region, Wiltshire, UK (September 2023). The trip informed the short experimental film the great mound, mama (2023), which centres on Silbury Hill — a large human-made mound dating to around 2400 BCE. Made in the field using gathered wildflowers, found objects, and archival images printed on transparent film, the cyanotypes act as material traces of somatic research — a method grounded in bodily presence and direct interaction with place. The light-dependent process mirrors both the site’s elemental forces and analogue film’s inscription of memory through light. Both the film and prints explore a geo-anatomical imaginary—the earth as body, mother, and archive —drawing on feminist cosmologies that reimagine landscape as a generative, sentient terrain where memory, myth, and embodiment converge.
Dancer's Slab - 2022, Super 8mm film transferred to digital video with sound, 3 minutes, 25 seconds. This experimental short engages with the Järrestad petroglyphs — a quartzite slab in southern Sweden bearing more than twelve thousand 3,000-year-old carvings associated with ritual, fertility, power, and myth. Filmed through a speculative lens, the work traces a composite, semi-fictional womanly figure used as a narrative and research guide across ancient sites. Catalogue-like observations of the carvings are intermittently interrupted by fleeting bodily presences — clothing, limbs, shifting rhythms — unsettling the film’s role as document and inviting an embodied encounter with the site’s layered histories.
Dancer’s Slab (installation view)
Dancer’s Slab (installation view) - (Dreams, an other world, Rotterdam), 2022, single-channel video on TV with sound, headphone, rock, installation dimensions variable
Mirror (woman) - 2021, 35mm research photograph of sculptural film props: glazed ceramic, mirror, 6.5 x 10 x 22.5 cm. Developed as part of early character research for a semi-speculative, composite-historical womanly figure following my master’s thesis, this work bridges sculpture and film prop. The piece draws inspiration from ancient copper and bronze mirrors encountered through research, as well as Henri Rousseau’s Beauty and the Beast (c.1908), reflecting on the mirror as both artefact and portal — a threshold between self, myth, and history.
Flowers (installation view) - 2019, glazed ceramic, foam, dyed canvas, grommets, wood, glass crystal, modified telephone with Arduino, looped sound (13 minutes, 58 seconds), installation dimensions variable. An installation made up of a landscape of thirty handmade, glazed ceramic wreaths couched in foam and a handmade/dyed canvas tent riddled with grommet holes and, inside, hung with hundreds of chandelier crystals. Upon entering the tent, viewers encountered a telephone table, ashtray, and a phone which they could pick up to hear the unsuspecting, looping conversation of two unidentified womanly voices talking about their dreams and roving their psyches.

Rehearsals for Departure / Site 9831-B (forthcoming visual-essay contribution), (OUTER) SPACE(S), Vol. 47, no. 1/2,

Datum:
Locatie: Kunstlicht (publication)
In samenwerking met: Kunstlicht

(OUTER) SPACE(S), Kunstlicht Vol. 47 no. 1/2, explores outer space as both material reality and cultural imagination. The issue examines space exploration in relation to geopolitics, extraction, technology, colonial histories, and speculative futures, foregrounding how cosmic imaginaries intersect with earthly infrastructures, power structures, and modes of representation.

https://tijdschriftkunstlicht.nl

SF scene-making EVENTS (forthcoming)

Datum:
Locatie: Platform DIS
In samenwerking met: Platform DIS, Nijmegen

Two participatory scene-making events in collaboration with Platform DIS, Nijmegen, where small groups of participants engage with site, props, costumes, and text- and sound-based prompts. The events function as collective laboratories for exploring speculative futures, feminist SF methods, and embodied, performative research, generating filmed and photographic material to inform ongoing artistic development.

https://platformdis.nl

SF scene-making EVENTS (forthcoming)

Datum:
In samenwerking met: Platform DIS, Nijmegen

Two research-based events developed with Platform DIS, Nijmegen, in which participants engage with site-responsive props, costumes, and prompts. The events explore embodied world-building and collective speculation, using feminist science fiction (SF) as a framework for developing scene-making as an artistic method.

https://platformdis.nl

(forthcoming screening)

Datum:
Locatie: Filmhuis Den Haag
In samenwerking met: wysiwyg
https://wysiwygcinema.net

(forthingcoming screening) wysiwyg

Datum:
Locatie: Filmhuis Den Haag
In samenwerking met: wysiwyg

With the aim of expanding visitors' horizons in film and art, platform wysiwyg has found a home at Filmhuis Den Haag. Each month, they organize various film programs, each with a different focus. Whether you are interested in seeing works that rarely make it to the cinema screen, exploring the role of sound in film, or discussing unfinished film projects with strangers — every month there is something for you at one of wysiwyg's programs at Filmhuis Den Haag.

https://filmhuisdenhaag.nl/wysiwyg

Sensory Walk (TEST EVENT)

Datum:
Locatie: Platform DIS, Nijmegen

A test event/developmental experiment developed to trial sculptural costume components and to explore how they reshape movement, sound, and perception in relation to landscape. The event generated feedback on material, sensory, and performative aspects of the work. The work forms part of an ongoing investigation into feminist science fiction, speculative evolution, and collective imagination.

https://platformdis.nl

Sound & Radio Works 2025

Datum:
Locatie: Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Scotland
In samenwerking met: Radiophrenia; Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Art

Radiophrenia is an artist run FM radio station broadcasting in Glasgow and online. Radiophrenia aims to promote the medium of radio as an art form and encourage experimental approaches to making radio that are not catered for by mainstream stations.

Experimental Pizza Club

Datum:
Locatie: W139, Amsterdam
In samenwerking met: W139

During Amsterdam Art Week, the Experimental Pizza Club will host a public dinner-event at the artist-run W139.

https://w139.nl

WORM x IFFR x ART ROTTERDAM

Datum:
Locatie: WORM, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: WORM, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Art Rotterdam

WORM and IFFR team up for four nights of collaborative programming; a wildly eclectic program combining film, music and more.

https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2024/events/worm-x-iffr

Dreams

Datum:
Locatie: an other world, Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: an other world

Studio Dreams is an artist’s studio in Rotterdam, located in the former De Player space in Afrikaanderwijk, since approximately September 2022. At some point in our very early days, one of us suggested to make a group exhibition together as a way to bond as studio mates, but also to locate, relocate, dislocate, localize and vocalize our sharing of space and our place and presence in the neighborhood.

https://anotherworldproject.space/Dreams_Studio_Dreams

come, Memory

Datum:
Locatie: WET, Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: WET

come, Memory is a film and scenographic installation, a result of a long trajectory of research, experimentation and collaboration, that centers on a series of ancient (especially Neolithic) European sacred sites, and looks speculatively, through embedded, eroded and residual evidence, at the presence/absence of the divine feminine.

https://wetfilm.org/2023/05/26/katrina-niebergal-come-memory/

Come to your senses

Datum:
Locatie: Good Times Bad Times community radio, Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: Good Times Bad Times community radio, Rotterdam

"Come to your senses" is a monthly radio show, broadcast on Good Times Bad Times community radio, Rotterdam. Through voice, sound, and song, it explores senso-r-eality; poetic capacity; cosmic entanglement; and beyond — and acts as a kind-of-notion-device or sort-of-diary for my life, research, and art practice.

https://katrinaniebergal.com/CTYS

Unbound Anthologies

Datum:
Locatie: project space at7; Available and The Rat, Rotterdam
In samenwerking met: project space at7; Available and The Rat

Together, the artists use the space to ask incomplete questions - presenting moments of intuitive object-making. The works present chapters in larger anthologies, characters of the past interacting with the present, and personal-historical weaves which invite us in and branch outside the exhibition space for the upcoming weeks.

http://availableandtherat.com/index.php

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