Kaspar Schmidt Mumm

Kaspar Schmidt Mumm is a contemporary artist with a socially engaged practice.

He builds large-scale street puppet theatre and tours with his band of communities around the world, offering workshops to create performances in the street. Kaspar is also a part of Slow Mango and The Bait Fridge in Australia and IFKIK in Germany.

Kaspar uses art as a pedagogic tool for participation in world-building. Using large-scale puppetry, live music, costume and performance, he facilitates public dialogue with an intersectional lens. For example, he decorated a car as a crocodile and drove it across a crocodile-infested river to gather students for school in remote Australia. 

In 2022, Kaspar used the Emerging Artist Grant to support his studies overseas. For the past three years, he has been studying a Master of Fine Art at UDK: Berlin, Institut Für Kunst Im Kontext (University of the Arts: Berlin, Institute for Art in Context). The institute has a unique transdisciplinary Master's program that explores the intersections of contemporary art, education and social engagement – emphasising collaborative, site-specific and context-sensitive artistic practices.

Kaspar was born in Germany, migrating to Australia 25 years ago. Like most public universities in Germany, the course is free of charge and accepts students without a Bachelor’s degree. While tuition fees were covered, this grant helped support relocation, living and artistic material costs related to his studies.

Apart from being one of the largest and most prominent arts universities in Europe, UDK is also one of the few places in the world that teaches the practices that Kaspar has based his career on, in the language he learned as a child. This postgraduate program is the only formal tertiary education he has undertaken in his career.

Kaspar learned a lot during his time in UDK. Looking back, he would advise his Semester 1 self to curb expectations with care, look after oneself, and try to listen to the small things. He acknowledges that leaving home to live and work in a different geographical and cultural location can be difficult, but with the right resources and people, integrating into a new life abroad doesn’t have to be daunting.

Kaspar is now wrapping up his thesis, entitled History Shapes us, myths we embody, based on his transcultural family’s repertoire. He has spent four years travelling between Germany, Canada, India and Australia collecting stories, artefacts, recipes, songs, dances and other parts of this family’s repertoire to ‘fabulate’ and ‘speculate’ history.

Kaspar is currently working with game developer Arthur Ah Chee to turn his most recent interactive Augmented Reality puppet installation into a game that combines the narratives of Indigenous and migrant Australia – redefining what the terms ‘Indigenous’ and ‘migrant’ mean in the eyes of society.