Marie Reichel (she/her)
Year
2024
Supervisor
Miya Yoshida
I am investigating surface relations within assemblages as sites of artistic translation. In this context, surface relations are understood as material and spatial domains through which translation unfolds. In contrast to conventional linguistic models of translation, which emphasise the transfer between source and target languages, this doctoral thesis conceptualises translation as a relational process that arises through contact, correspondence and negotiation. Whilst not every relationship constitutes a translation, I argue that translation takes place where surface relationships configure meaning, agency and material presence.
Drawing on Tim Ingold’s concept of the palimpsest and on theories of material agency, surfaces are understood not as passive boundaries, but as sites where material and semiotic processes emerge together — not as edges that divide inside from outside, depth from surface, but as zones where these distinctions are continuously unsettled. Assemblage works both as an artistic technique and as a research method: it relates heterogeneous surfaces — objects, materials, images, texts, gestures — to one another, tracing how meaning and material presence shape each other.
Bio
Marie Reichel is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice ranges from sculpture to drawing, photography, film, book design, performance and music to spatial installations. She investigates how surface relations in assemblage operate as sites of artistic translation, where meaning emerges through material encounter, relational configuration, and mutual transformation. After training as a graphic designer (2010–2012), she studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2012–2017), with a six-month period at Newcastle University (2016), which was followed by a study of architecture at the Vienna University of Technology (2018–2021). Marie worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Art and Design at TU Wien (2020–2026). since 2024 she is persuing a PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are included in collections such as the Artothek of the Republic of Austria, University of Applied Art Vienna, EVN Collection, State Collections of Lower Austria, and Vienna’s City collection MA7. In 2025 she co-founded the collective touché, which understand themselves as a forum for fostering and mediating interdisciplinary artistic practices and discourses. As an art association based in Vienna, touché work independently of location and realise projects without a fixed address.