Inken Reinert

Inken Reinert was born in Jena in 1965 and lives and works in Berlin. She worked as a ceramist until 1993. From 1993 to 1999, she studied painting at the Berlin-Weißensee Academy of Art. In 2000, she was a master student of Werner Liebmann, and from 2008 to 2009, she was an assistant to Julie Mehretu. Since 2002, she has been active as one of the hosts of the Damensalon, a Berlin network of women working in the cultural sector that regularly invites members to exchange ideas. Inken Reinert exhibits her work in Germany and abroad and has received numerous scholarships, including from the Kunstfonds Foundation, the Berlin Senate, and the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Thuringia.

Inken Reinert's works are based on found and used materials, placing their historical, political, and social connotations and the memories stored within them in a new context. She deals with the upheavals that political and social transformations bring with them and explores their influence on architecture, design, and public and private space. In this way, she comments analytically, sometimes poetically, on the contrasts between utopia, reality, and individual lifestyles. Shifts in value systems and processes of repression in both the physical and psychological sense, as they occurred after the collapse of socialism as a social system, are the focus of many of her works.