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GermanyArtists

Biography

Maria Pfrommer is an artist, curator and cultural mediator based in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied Fine Arts at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts with Stephan Balkenhol, Corinne Wasmuht and Jeremy Shaw, and has continued there since 2025 as a Meisterschülerin in Jeremy Shaw’s class. She is also completing an MA in Cultural Mediation at the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe, following studies in Art History and Architectural History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Pfrommer’s practice extends across exhibition-making, public art and collaborative projects. In 2024, she realised *In Zukunft werden wir silberne Kängurus jagen* for the Nieheimer Kunstpfad, following her first-prize award in the competition. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at venues including Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein, Orgelfabrik Karlsruhe-Durlach, Luis Leu, Kunstverein Zehnthaus Jockgrim, Museum Xylon, and the Donaueschinger Regionale. Her solo exhibitions include *Dinge beim Namen nennen* at BBK Karlsruhe (2023), *Hmmm* at Schwarzwaldverein Altes Rathaus Neubulach (2023), and *Entmystifizierung eines Dino Chicken Nuggets des Firmherren „Ja“* in Karlsruhe (2025). In 2026, Pfrommer’s work will be shown at BUNA Art Festival in Varna, as well as at Kunstverein Pforzheim, Q18 in Cologne, Kunst und Klima Raum in Stuttgart, and the Werner Brand Kunstpreis exhibition. She will also take on curatorial roles as curator of the Curatorial Program at Quartier am Hafen in Cologne and artistic director of PUTTE Projektraum in Neu-Ulm. Her forthcoming solo exhibition, *The Tomato Problem*, will open at Kunstverein Bad Aibling in 2027. Pfrommer has received the GegenwART Grant from Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the Akademiepreis from Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, and was nominated for the Werner Brand Kunstpreis in 2026. Her work has been published in exhibition catalogues and in *Monopol Magazin*, *Suboartmagazine* and *The System Magazine*.

Archive records · BUNA vol. 4 / 2026

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with Luca Cottier

Employee Wanted combines installation, performance, and sound to explore structures of labour, exploitation, surveillance, loyalty, and institutional power. The work examines how individuals are shaped by economic and institutional systems and how mechanisms of discipline and control enter everyday working environments. The installation is informed by socio-theoretical approaches including Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Clayton Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Innovation. While Christensen describes how new technologies and business models can disrupt established market structures, Foucault examines the development of disciplinary and surveillance mechanisms and their influence on individual behaviour. These ideas are connected to contemporary working conditions and corporate structures. Originally realised at the Orgelfabrik Karlsruhe in 2025, the installation is adapted to the specific architecture and history of the former Russian Consulate in Varna. The corridor functions as a waiting area and is filled with numerous objects associated with consumer society: everyday items, packaging waste, short-lived products, and discarded goods. Their excessive accumulation refers to overproduction, consumption, and the transience of contemporary commodities. From this waiting area, visitors are called individually into an office, where they are invited to participate in what initially appears to be a conventional job interview for a position in logistics or human resources management. The interview combines elements of contemporary corporate recruitment procedures, including Amazon’s STAR method, with questions informed by Foucault’s analysis of discipline and institutional control. As the conversation progresses, however, its character gradually changes. Alongside questions about professional experience and working behaviour, participants are confronted with questions concerning personal identity, loyalty, and their willingness to subordinate their own interests to those of a larger institution. The conventional job interview thereby shifts almost imperceptibly into a fictional recruitment process for an intelligence service. Participants who decide to continue are led into a second room, where another stage of the selection process takes place. Physical and cognitive exercises test their fitness as well as fictional skills associated with surveillance and information gathering. These may include running, grip-strength exercises, climbing, self-defence tactics, and tasks requiring observation and concentration. The selection process eventually extends beyond the installation itself. Participants receive a fictional assignment that takes them across the grounds of the BUNA Festival, where they are asked to demonstrate their abilities in surveillance, observation, and information gathering. In this way, the boundaries of the installation expand into the surrounding festival space. The intelligence-service dimension responds directly to the history of the exhibition site as a former Russian Consulate and connects this institutional history with broader questions of surveillance, loyalty, discipline, and political influence. Throughout the installation, an advertising jingle composed from European and American commercials creates an acoustic layer that reflects the aggressiveness of contemporary advertising and consumer culture. Together, the accumulation of consumer goods, the staged office environment, the interviews, physical tests, and surveillance tasks create a participatory situation in which visitors experience shifting structures of corporate and institutional control.