Olivia Coeln

Olivia Coeln was born in Vienna in 1991, where she lives and works.

The ongoing series Carps is showing photographs of Koi Carps all taken at one fish tank in a zoo. Olivia Coeln works a lot on the postproduction of the taken images by manipulating facial expressions and gestures, adding variable colors and light and often morphing parts of different images together. Her main interests in the non human bodies are ways of projections and mystifications, in direct contact between human and other creatures described in folkloristic storytelling and bestiaries, fairy tales, comics and movies. For this specific series she got influenced by the work of Adriaen Coenen, a dutch fish auctioneer who illustrated a book called Visboock in the middle of the 16th century where he included biological studies of all kinds of sea fishes as well as imaginary beings such as dragons and sea monsters.