Sabine Bürger studied visual art at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster with Professor Ulrich Erben, and at Düsseldorf Art Academy, becoming a ‘Meisterschüler’ with Professor Günther Uecker. In the late 1980s she was awarded a grant by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to study at the Royal College of Art in London. She continued living in London for six years, exploring performance art and self-portraits in photography. From the late 1990s on she exhibited her black and white photography widely, including at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Her work also featured as cover stories in the German photographic magazines Photonews and Schwarzweiss. Since 2007 she has been concentrating mainly on video, exploring the interface between video and sound. She has worked with different musicians on various projects resulting in collaborations with Heiner Göbbels (D), William Basinski (US), Machinefabriek (NL), Steve Roden (US), and Svarte Greiner (N), amongst others.
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Second Nature, a group exhibition that Bürger co-curated and participated in, exploring cultural perceptions of nature and employing a wide range of media, was shown at Galerie Vayhinger, Radolfzell/Germany in spring 2014. Great Expectations, her video and photographic portrait of the Wisbech & Fenland Museum has been presented, amongst other venues, at Duisburg-Essen University (2016), CHAT2017, a conference organised by University of Amsterdam (2017) as well as, in June 2018, at Art, Materiality and Representation, a conference at the British Museum, London. Helga Müller, her video-text portrait of the German gallerist Helga Müller, which also addressed a substantial period of German post-war art history, was included in the exhibition "Cologne’s Beginnings as a Global Art City”, curated by students from the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the University of Cologne under the supervision of Nadine Oberste-Hetbleck, Junior Professor of Art History and the Art Market, and Günter Herzog, ZADIK, Cologne. More recent audio-visual collaborations include The Silver Key with the experimental Mexican composer Rosalía Soria Luz, presented at ISSTA International Festival and Conference on Sound in the Arts, Science and Technology, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland (2017) and Neander’s Hollow, with Dutch musician Anne Chris Bakker, exhibited at Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf in autumn 2018. Her 12-channel video Soma(2)_Moksha, conceived as a large-scale facade project, was shown at EP7, Av. de France Paris (opposite la Bibliothèque nationale de France) in September 2021.
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In addition, she has been working as a translator for museums since 2005 (with Tim Beeby). Current and recent translation projects include the exhibition catalogue for Say Shibboleth! On Visible and Invisible Borders, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Hohenems/Austria (2018); the translation of Out of Place, a publication accompanying Skulptur Projekte Münster, as well as ones for the Skulptur Projekte Münster Archiv (2017); A-Z. The Marzona Collection at the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2017); and the complete catalogue for 10 Americans. After Paul Klee, an exhibition touring from Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern (2017) to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2018), texts for A Fire in My Belly at Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin (2020/21), and translations for the exhibition This World Is White No Longer. Views of a Decentered World, Rupertinum, Salzburg (2021). Her essay "Working with artists and curators: Translating for the contemporary art world”, co-authored with Tim Beeby, appeared in Translation – Kunstkommunikation – Museum, Barbara Ahrens et al. (eds.), published in April 2021 by Frank & Timme Verlag, Berlin.