Shona Kitchen

Background

About Shona Kitchen

Shona Kitchen is an internationally recognized artist, designer and educator currently based in Bolzano, Italy. Since graduating in Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London in 1997, she has divided her time between creative practice, research (within academic institutions and through independent creative practice), and teaching. 2014-2024 she was Department Head of Graduate program Digital + Media (Art, Technology + Emergent Practices) at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA. She is currently Full professor within the Art & Design Program at Unibz, Bolzano, Italy. Her work spans a range of outputs from public art, conceptual narrative proposals, book works, exhibitions, and interactive sculpture/installation. Her practice is frequently collaborative and often site-specific. Using digital, analog, and biological elements, Kitchen’s work provides ground for physical and virtual, natural and artificial, and real and imagined to playfully and poetically co-exist. Throughout her practice, she deeply explores the psychological, social, and environmental consequences of technological advancement and failure. Her projects often function as imagined propositions, or as an alternate- or future- histories that reveal and subvert the unseen technological forces in the world around us in order to critically examine the man-made infrastructures that make up the fabric of everyday life. Her vision is distinctly Ballardian and darkly comic. At times emergent technologies are trained back on themselves in absurd gestures that suggest ways in which the natural and technological worlds might exist symbiotically. In other instances, Kitchen transposes technologies that are ubiquitous in the manmade world onto the alien terrain of wilderness, creating absurd micro-environments that expose our complicated relationship with technology. Kitchen’s practice is heavily research based. She inserts herself into an existing system — such as an institution, a situation, or an area of knowledge — in order to microcosmically investigate its structure.