Cella
Transart Co-founder and Director
An international artist, Cella has exhibited photographs at the Berlin Biennale, Lisbon Architectural Triennale, Tallinn Print Triennale, Rochester Museum of Fine Art, Melbourne Photo Biennale, Ruhr Biennale and Santorini Biennale. Cella holds an MFA degree and studied at Washington Square Institute for Psychoanalytic Training in New York, l’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and l’Université Paris-Sorbonne and independently with Nicholas Nixon and Robert Frank. Cella collaborated for sixteen years on projects with her partner Klaus Peter Knoll, PhD, until his death in 2014. Their photographs are found in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Bibliothèque Nationale Paris; National Austrian Fine Art Photography Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, and Art Complex Museum, Boston. They co-founded the Transart Institute, a planetesimal platform for cross-pollination between people and institutions doing creative research––offering border-free, low-residency, and trans-local 1-year MFAs, Practice PhDs, and Academy Praxis Refreshers & Propellers since 2004. TT is currently in accreditation partnership with Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) UK. She designs and edits the occasional journal ELSE.
Praxis Statement
Cella’s praxis grapples with questions around the location of home, living in liminality, the collapsing and expanding of time and space, and above all the in-between. Everything she does to further her searches: the photographs, buildings, essays, schools, architectural projections, the roaming, designing, foundings, reading, and curating, is part and wholly “it”, entwined. Documents and artifacts act as vessels in the long run, and as evidence and indicators in the meantime. Key threads running include time travel, jetlag, vivid dreaming; the uncanny, home, architecture, spaces in-between, palimpsests, nostalgia, memory, longing, regret; trauma, flow, affect, and other states of temporality. Minimalism informs the work on all levels. Her work is phenomenologically driven and informed by auto-ethnography. The work embraces the aleatoric and is aesthetic in the midst of poetic, political, social, and environmental concerns.
Current art and/or research interest
Current projects include a collection of lyric and photographic essays entitled “Betwixt” mulling over ways to live in liminality, questioning whether home may be “there" for some of us. In discussion over a potential new issue of ELSE with the theme “The Contemporary Sublime”. A new carry-on suitcase design is patent-pending.