ABOUT DENNIS KRATZ

From 2004 to 2007, Svenja Kratz collaborated with writer, artist, and filmmaker Sarah Mace-Dennis under the collective name Dennis Kratz. Together, they produced a series of new media and photographic works exploring themes of history, memory, presence, and absence. In 2004, they embarked on a seven-week collaborative residency in the regional community of Hill End, NSW, where they began Guided by Voices, a new media project centered on the notions of presence, absence, and the passage of time. Following this residency, they developed an interactive video installation titled To Rose (My Love), which investigated the mysterious death of a woman and her three children on her property in Triamble, approximately 45 kilometers from Hill End.

In 2005, Dennis Kratz was awarded a residency at Petersham Town Hall in Marrickville, where they collaborated with Sydney-based public artist Graham Chalcroft to create Secrets of the City: Gumbramorra Swamp Thing!. This experimental art event included workshops in which participants created site-specific public artworks and installations that mapped and reinterpreted stories from sites within the historical footprint of the former Gumbramorra Swamp, encompassing the areas of Marrickville, Sydenham, Tempe, St Peters, and Newtown.

In 2006, Dennis Kratz received funding from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts to develop Di.O.ram.a: Constructing a Virtual Memory, an online new media project that used language as a portal to investigate historical memory and its transformation within a landscape increasingly mediated by digital technologies.

The following year, Kratz and Mace-Dennis collaborated with artist Archie Moore on Where Whispers Walk, an interactive video animation commissioned by Artworkers Alliance and the State Library of Queensland. This work was installed in the SLQ InfoZone in 2007, offering an interactive visual experience to library visitors.