A Choral Method
10–14 September 2025
LUCA School of Arts, Ghent, Belgium
Klara Kofen UK/DE
Klara Kofen is an artist, dramaturg, writer, and researcher whose work is concerned with histories—speculative, counterfactual, real and imagined—and the ways technological interfaces shape our relationship to time and affect.
As the artistic director of Waste Paper Opera since 2015, she creates sound-based multimedia performances that challenge traditional boundaries between live art, music, and technology. The collective defines opera as a form of multimodal performance spanning light, sound, speech, voice, gesture, film, sensing and sculpture—combining objects, space, and infrastructure. She also performs with Phorne, a band with Cameron Graham exploring sensory percussion, voice, and technologically mediated environments.
Her research is rooted in a background in early modern history, particularly the history of science, the French Revolution, legal and metabolic histories, and the historiography of rupture. She has written and presented on subjects including trade secrets and artificial intelligence, the origins of meteorology, mystical sects in the seventeenth century, baroque gesture, scientific diagrams, and models of common ownership in performance. Her practice weaves historical inquiry with motion capture, speech, film, installation, and digital media, often working across synchronous and asynchronous timeframes.
Recent works include fake & extinct (Centrale Fies, 2025), which stages dialogues between stones and legal philosophers to explore non-synchronous sovereignty and water infrastructures; Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments (Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2024), a collaboration with Bahar Noorizadeh on the sentimental logic of capitalism; and Dead Cat Bounce (2024 UK tour), an oratorio about finance and catastrophe created with Gary Zhexi Zhang. In opera, Kofen collaborates as a dramaturg and writer with ensembles including Ensemble Molière and Opera Settecento. Her writing has appeared in Catastrophe Time! (MIT Press/Strange Attractor, 2023) and through Onomatopee.
She is currently a creative fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL London, and was previously a fellow on the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s Opera Making course. She studied history at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford.
Klara was born into a Greek/Polish family and grew up in a commune in Düsseldorf. She works at the Bookartbookshop in London and occasionally investigates international trade shows.