From 1981 he studied German language and literature, philosophy and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but also dabbled as a musician and finally dropped out in 1983 to work as an assistant to the experimental filmmaker Werner Nekes.

[4] Already as a young man Schlingensief had organized art events in the cellar of his parents' house, and local artists such as Helge Schneider or Theo Jörgensmann performed in his early short films.

Other influences include Luis Buñuel, Werner Schroeter or Herbert Achternbusch—and Schlingensief's filmic works have been compared to just as wide a range of filmmakers, from Jean-Luc Godard to Russ Meyer.

Schlingensiefs Container) at the time of the FPÖ and ÖVP coalition in Austria, a work which attracted international support, a media frenzy and countless debates about art practice.

[5] In 1997, Schlingesief staged an art action at the documenta X exhibition in Kassel as part of the performance space "Hybrid WorkSpace", which was curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Nancy Spector and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

[6] His exhibition The Last Hour, with its twisted metalwork from a crashed car, footage of a long tunnel and paparazzi pictures of Princess Diana, was in 2006 rejected by the Frieze Art Fair in London's Regent's Park and instead ended up in a little-known gallery space in Bethnal Green.

In 2007, the Haus der Kunst, Munich, mounted an exhibition of Schlingensief's work; it presented African Twin Towers and short films that have been shot while the artist directed The Flying Dutchman at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil.

He also directed a version of Hamlet, subtitled, This is your Family, Nazi~Line, which premiered in Switzerland, the so-called neutral territory equated with the Denmark of the opening line in Shakespeare's play where there is something foul afoot.

The artist duo Ubermorgen provided the Internet platform Nazi~Line[9] for the project, where former members of Neo Nazi groups were sought and then cast as actors to play characters in the drama on stage as a way of re-integrating the ex-Neo-Nazis with the common workforce of the theatre.

[4] In 2012, numerous internationally renowned artists have donated works for a fundraising auction at the Hamburger Bahnhof, among them Marina Abramović, Pipilotti Rist, Georg Baselitz, Christo, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Wolfgang Tillmans and Günther Uecker.

[19]In 2011, the jury of the 54th Venice Biennale awarded the international exhibition's highest honor, the "Golden Lion for best national pavilion", to Germany for its display of work by Christoph Schlingensief.

Organized by curator Susanne Gaensheimer, who completed the exhibition after Schlingensief's death,[20] the German pavilion was transformed into a replica of the church where the artist spent his teenage years as an altar boy in order to present Fluxus Oratorio, the second of his three-part final work, created after he had undergone surgery to remove a lung.

A side room showed footage and a maquette made as part of Schlingensief's project to build an opera house in Burkina Faso, while another wing displayed a selection of films from throughout his career.

In an interview with Berliner Zeitung, artist Gerhard Richter had previously criticised Schlingensief's appointment as "a scandal", associating the selection of the multitasking director with "the decline of painting".