Lisa Maria Baier (born in Görlitz in 1988) is a visual artist based in Dresden whose work deals with language, memory, visual culture, and the political and emotional consequences of migration and historical ruptures. She studied fine arts at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest (2010-2017) and completed her studies as a master student (2017- 2021). Since then, she has been working freelance in the fields of documentary photography, video, installation, and performative research.

Her artistic practice focuses on forms of communication, archiving, and misunderstanding. Baier is interested in how stories are passed on, distorted, concealed, or only fragmentarily transmitted— whether through language, images, or material traces in landscapes. She uses visual errors, analog disturbances, archival material, and handmade objects as aesthetic means to reveal breaks in collective narratives. A recurring theme in her work is the inheritance of memory and belonging in regions marked by displacement, border shifts, and multilingualism. Having grown up in the border region with Poland, she deals intensively with her family’s history of migration. This biographical experience serves not as a nostalgic point of reference, but as a starting point for a critical examination of identity, loss, and the question of how landscapes become archives of unspoken history. In her projects, Baier combines analytical precision with poetic openness. She examines how visual and linguistic systems generate meaning—and how misunderstanding, fragmentation, and ambiguity can function as productive forms of knowledge and expression. Her works create spaces in which individual and collective experiences can overlap and be renegotiated.

“During my stay in the Künstler*dorf Schöppingen, I developed a series of installation, performance, and media-based works that dealt with democracy, memory culture, and East German perspectives on social transformation processes. The starting point was my own socialization in the East German province, marked by right-wing violence, anti-fascist resistance, and a specific understanding of political responsibility. This biographical influence served as an analytical filter for my examination of the West German context of Schöppingen.

I used all available spaces in the Künstler*dorf to create new room installations every month, each of which was made accessible as part of the Open Studios. At the same time, I initiated the POTLUCK exhibition, developed a public action at the Labspace for November 9, Reichspogromnacht, and designed several performances and video works in public space.

A central element was the cleansing performance on the East German perspective on reunification, democratic desires, and political visibility. This was expanded by a subsequent projection installation that raised questions about representation: Who is heard, who is not? Which voices and historical narratives disappear from collective memory—and which remain? As part of my research, I also explored the decommissioned NATO site and produced video experiments on the disappearance of public monuments in Schöppingen, which I contrasted with GDR iconographic lines of sight using a green screen. These superimpositions served to reveal breaks, omissions, and reinterpretations in local cultures of remembrance.

All of the works followed an open-ended, resonance-based approach in which reactions from the local community, the Künstler*dorf, and the public space itself were actively incorporated into the further development of the installations. The artistic practice thus became a process of collective reflection on democratic structures, political influences, and the question of which stories a society remembers and which it silences.“