Heike Mutter is a professor for beginner supervision in the Graphic and Photography program at HFBK Hamburg.

She studied at the HfG Karlsruhe and at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne (under Jürgen Klauke and Marcel Odenbach). Since completing her studies, she has worked as an independent artist, filmmaker and photographer. Since 2007 Heike Mutter is professor at HFBK Hamburg.

Heike Mutter’s work in the media of painting, photography, film and installation is shaped by a discourse on the circumstances of the art system. For her current projects, the artist works with Ulrich Genth to create extensive and to some degree interactive installations in pubic spaces, museums and galleries. These site-specific and context-specific artworks represent a kind of criticism of art institutions – they evade being pinned down to a definitive form or pigeonholed in a museum. They aim to walk the border between the art system and everyday society by incorporating democratic processes. Mutter and Ulrich Genth designed the internationally renowned large sculpture Tiger & Turtle – Magic Mountain in Duisburg, which was unveiled in the autumn of 2011.

Her most recent projects include Smart Light, an interactive installation in public space, Gwangyang, South Korea (2025); a project in urban space in Vienna (2023), SpaceWalk, a large-scale sculpture in Pohang, South Korea (2021), and the exhibition Trusted Surfaces at Kunstverein Leipzig (2019).