bio
Samuel Mu Koch is a multimedia artist and researcher based between Amsterdam and Zürich. His practice is research based, process oriented and often in dialogue or collaboration with other disciplines and people. He has a background in photography, image production as well as chemistry and spatial politics. Understanding images as depictions of actualities and matter as inherently transformativ his work considers their political, social and historic embeddeness. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing, laboratory practices involving microbes and fungi, as well as soil-based practices, cooking and taste, his works bring narrative modes, image and knowledge regimes into correspondence and investigate commodity histories and labor histories.

Coming from a background of material research and laboratory practices his ideas often relate the microbial world to an urban, cultural and global scale and engage with politics of space, material manifestations of memory and fictions, the production and logistics of food within global and urban infrastructural system, the depiction of appetite, infection, death and sexuality in film and eating as political act. His work reflects on the paradoxical logics of national narratives and nation states through commodity and labor histories and he explores how matter, especially matter in circulation such as foods, are physical and metaphorical carriers reflecting the social, ecological, political, and cultural dimensions of the environments in which it is produced, transported, and consumed.

His works often live in their disappearance and in the intimacy of a theatrical moment—being tasted, chewed, swallowed, and digested.

Mu is an imitator of OTHE (Other-than-Human-Entity) a radical pedagogical teaching format founded in collaboration with Stephanie Scholl and Jan Hofer. OTHE has been hosting workshops, dinners, tastings and participated in exhibitions across Switzerland. OTHE has been granted two subsequent fellowships with School of Commons. Mu is also a co-founder and active member of FUBU, a grass-roots social justice collective focusing on soil-based community practices, transgenerational exchange, sustainable social urban gardening. In collaboration with Melanie Mathieu he has been organizing Polo Poetics since 2014, an intimate in-car poetry reading. Together with Stan Wiersma he co-organized a five-day residency engaging with the unique landscape and topography of the Waddenzee in north of the Netherlands.

Mu has organized various talks and lectures including with artist and film maker Sameer Farooq and director and film maker Tillo Spreng. From 2014 until 2016 he co-hosted with Melanie Matthieu at Zurich School of Arts including guests such as Maria Loboda, Matt Mullican, Anne Imhof, Sadie Plant, Glass Bead, Chiara Fumai and more. In 2017 he also curated the project space Khôra.

Mu has held various workshops including at institutions such as Basel Academy of Art and Design (FHNW), Zürich University of Arts (ZHdK) and Sandberg Institute (SI). He presented his work at various occasions, participated in the Alimiento Symposium organized by The Sustainable Agroecology Group at ETH in collaboration with La Capsula and has exhibited in various national and international contexts. Mu has also co-authored scientific publication on photothermal agents for cancer treatment.

Mu’s practice is inherently collaborative often working closely with friends, collaborators and other associates. He is actively collaborating with Sanae Oujjit. He is also collaborating in a discipline bridging project with the anthropologist Luca Bruls, for which they have received a focus grant by Pro Helvetia. Mu has collaborated with Timon Bony Essoungou, Mathia Halter, Zoë Heyn-Jones, Aìda Tariq Rebull, Nina Emge, Tina Omayemi Reden, Stan Wiersma, Cara Manuala Meyer Yepez, and more.

Contact for cv and portfolio.

contact
mukoch@etik.com