Alexander Birchler is a Fellow to the John D. Murchison Regents Professorship in Art. Birchler has been working collaboratively with Teresa Hubbard since 1990. Their work, primarily grounded in time-based media, aims to inspire sensorial interactions and explore connections between social life, history and memory. Hubbard / Birchler often seek engagement with adjacent fields of study that have more conventionally been considered the domain of the anthropologist, archeologist or historian. They represented Switzerland in the Swiss Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, presenting Flora in the exhibition Women of Venice, curated by Philipp Kaiser. Hubbard / Birchler’s video installation, Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come, is on view nightly at the Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park, Austin, through 2029.
Hubbard / Birchler have presented their work at many of the most prominent art institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof–Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; Tate Museum Liverpool; Irish Museum of Modern Art Dublin; Kunstmuseum Basel; Reina Sofia Museum Madrid; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the 48th + 57th Venice Biennale.
Their work is held in numerous permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; Sammlung Goetz Munich; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian, Washington D. C.; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art LACMA; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles MOCA; National Museum of Art Osaka and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
Hubbard / Birchler’s exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times; Artforum International; Art in America; Cabinet; Frieze; Kunst-Bulletin; November; Millenium Film Journal; Monopol and Parkett. Their work is featured on the PBS series, Art 21 – Art in the 21st Century, an educational archive, resource and history of contemporary art that is broadcast in over 50 countries. Hubbard / Birchler are represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.
Birchler grew up in Switzerland and studied at the Academy of Art and Design Basel and the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. In 1992, he received his MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. He has been awarded numerous grants, fellowships and participated in international artist residencies including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Banff Centre for the Arts; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Landis & Gyr Foundation, London; International Program for Visual and Applied Arts IASPIS, Stockholm and Civitella Ranieri, Umbria. In 2017, Birchler was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax. Prior to joining the UT faculty in 2018, Birchler was a faculty member at Bard College, New York and the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In 2023, he was a recipient of the Inaugural Faculty Development Award at the University of Texas at Austin.