Katja Ruge Works to Make Women Visible in Electronic Music

By Carla-Isabella Dunger

Photographer, music producer, DJ, event organiser, and activist, Katja Ruge does not stay seated. She stands, walks a few steps, turns back, and keeps talking, her hands moving as she speaks. It’s not nervousness, she says, it’s just how she thinks, as if the story needs to move through the room before it can settle into language.

There is a Roland TR-808 rhythm composer on the doormat, a Moog analogue synthesiser on the cutting board, and a photo of Aphex Twin, taken by her, hanging on the wall.

I know Katja from a feminist event. We connected originally through political and feminist work, but also through Hamburg, where we’re both from, and our shared fascination with the Golden
Pudel Club, a legendary venue near the city’s harbour, one that has shaped generations of local underground music and musicians.

Katja Ruge wears many hats: photographer, curator, and more—she does a lot. But in her mind, these are not separate roles but rather all part of one complete artistic practice.

“The core of my work is shaping perception,” she says. “No matter if I photograph someone, DJ, produce, curate, or organise, I’m working on how something is experienced.” Her work, she says, is about “translating feeling into form” and “human connection is always the central thread”.

What did you do before working in club culture?

Before clubs, cameras, and parties, as a child in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, Katja Ruge loved listening to the radio through headphones while watching television.

Katja Ruge tells me this early collision of image and sound was the first big spark. One example: A Western film on TV would be running silently while Depeche Mode played in her ears.

She started going to clubs at seventeen. At Front, one of Hamburg’s most legendary nightclubs, which ran from 1983 to 1997, the DJ booth was hidden.

“It was a good mystery,” she tells me. She did not fully understand what DJs actually did until later, during her time in England, where a flatmate organised illegal raves and kept two turntables and a mixer in his room.

Why were you in England?

“Because I have a fascination for England,” she says. “Especially for Manchester, the epicentre of music in the 90s.”

While he was out, she practised alone on her flatmate’s equipment, listening and learning with happy hardcore records—without telling anyone. (Happy hardcore, also known as 4-beat, is a subgenre of hardcore dance music. It emerged both from the UK breakbeat hardcore rave scene, and the Belgian, German, and Dutch hardcore techno scenes in the early 1990s.)

“I realised pretty quickly that I had a feeling for it,” she says. “But I didn’t tell anyone. I had no female role models. I never thought I could do this as a real job.”

After she moved back to Germany, Katja realised there was a gap between the music she listened to while living abroad and what she found back at home—it felt “immediate”.

After England, how did you start working in nightlife in Germany?

A friend asked her to play at Hasenschaukel, a bar on the Reeperbahn in St. Pauli, one of the most famous streets in Hamburg, which ran from 2004 to 2016. Her friend believed in the idea that “everybody can be a DJ”, and this encouragement helped.

From there, Katja Ruge became part of Lovegang, a small collective formed in 2007 between her and some close friends. They organised parties, and somewhat to Katja’s surprise, the parties seemed to work. But during those first events, something bothered her: the sound system itself.

How did you start organising parties?

In 2010, with a friend from Lovegang, she started the event Kann Denn Liebe Synthie Sein (“Can love be synth?”). The sound became clearer and focused on synthesisers, analogue textures, and a love of 1980s machinery.

Her instinct to notice where something fell short and imagine new ways to improve it led her to work at Golem, a small club on Hamburg’s river Elbe. Golem gave her the combination she wanted: good sound and a room that was small enough to shape.

At Golem, she could think beyond individual DJ sets—her focus became imagining entire nights as complete musical compositions.

After Golem closed in 2017, the parties continued at the Golden Pudel Club before coming to a full, sudden stop during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. After that, she feared they would be permanently paused—they were put on hold for several years.

But then she lights up: Her party series finally returned to the Golden Pudel Club this year: it restarts this Saturday, on 25 April 2026.

You’re also producing music. Tell me about that!

Production entered her life around twelve years ago, she estimates—though she speaks about it differently than other parts of her work. Under the duo name Can Love Be Synth, she produces with her friend, collaborator, and fellow artist Frank Husemann at Synthesiser Studio Hamburg.

Why do you feel the Golden Pudel Club is so important?

For her, the Golden Pudel Club is more than just a club. It has been part of her life for decades. She thinks she first photographed it around 2000.

For clarity: Katja Ruge is now, in her own words, the “unofficial” photographer for the club. “I was never officially employed or told ‘you are our club photographer'”, she tells me. “Really, I just started doing it. It developed very organically. The documentary work and the photography are essentially the same thing. I accompany the club’s journey.”

These days, “I mainly do portraits of the artists, staff, and occasionally the guests. I’m a typical club photographer for everything else that comes up. Whenever the Pudel needs photos for an article, I take them. Or if people need to be photographed for a Pudel release, I do that too.”

She loves not only the club’s programme but also how the space is designed and how it functions socially. There is no separation between artist and audience, no backstage, no hierarchy. For her, this is what club culture is supposed to be: “The space is direct, everyone is close together, it’s slightly chaotic, and it’s open enough to allow things to happen that are not planned.”

She describes it as a kind of parallel universe, a place that embraces oddness and produces a level of unpredictability that has nearly disappeared from other clubs.

In electronic music culture, Katja Ruge observes a growing distance between artist and audience, which she says has shifted the focus from what drew her to club culture in the first place.

Let’s talk about your photography.

Katja Ruge creates portraits of artists across the electronic music scene and runs a project called Ladyflash, which focuses on female artists.

“When I started this project, no one wanted it. I photographed over 100 female artists, and no
one would exhibit it. To date, Ladyflash has only been shown once. But I see male photographers again and again who shoot artists simply because they’re already famous and know people.”

When Ladyflash was exhibited, she printed all one hundred portraits at the same size.
“Everyone needed to be equal.”

I sense the anger. Long before institutions wanted to speak publicly about making women more visible in electronic music, she tells me she was already doing it—without institutional support and usually without the recognition given more freely to men.

Tell me about the FLINTA* Electronic Music Conference.

Her curatorial talents shaped the FLINTA* Electronic Music Conference in Frankfurt—the 2026 two-day event, held last February at MOMEM, was the first in what she hopes will be an annual gathering of women working in music and nightlife. Through panels, workshops, conversations, and a club night, the conference addressed access, community, and healing for women working in electronic music.

At its core was the question of who gets access to technical knowledge, tools, and artistic practice in a field still shaped by cis male-dominated structures. She tells me that FEMC created a space for FLINTA* people to share their experiences, ask questions openly, and learn collectively.

Her hopes for it: “It is a place where sustainable networks can emerge and where structures can be changed over time,” she says.

The strong response to the event proved, in her mind, the need for such a space, and she’s already planning for it to return in 2027.

Tell me about Electronic Lights.

Electric Lights is a project that moves across photography, music, and events. What began as a photographic and editorial series of portraits and conversations with women artists evolved into a live experience once it entered a planetarium in Hamburg, Berlin, and—for the first time this year—Bochum, in northern Germany.

The location is necessary for the event, she tells me: people lie on the floor under a full dome of pictures and stars.

With performances by women artists like Helena Hauff, JakoJako, Akua, DJ MELL G, Nadia Struiwigh, and Cinthie—and through photos of many more artists like Afrodeutsche and Suzanne Ciani—Electronic Lights is an event that builds a living archive of women in electronic music.

The first Electric Lights event took place two weeks before Katja’s mother died, and in her mind, that first event is linked a bit to that profound loss.

“I knew my mom’s death was coming. Even so, it felt important to organise the event. Now that she’s passed and the event was a success, I feel both things. Infinity and mortality.”

What makes an image work?

Taking a photograph of an artist—especially a legendary one—has its challenges, but Katja has an inner guide to it that she trusts.

“When I photograph someone, perfection does not interest me. Usually, it’s just a small break, something slightly off. It’s a little detail that gives the image life.”

As our conversation ends, she’s back where she started: crisscrossing the room, talking, shaping the atmosphere. I stand, give her a hug, and ask one final thing:

How would you summarise what you do to someone totally new?

“I create conditions in which something good can happen.”

Katja Ruge is part of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie e.V. (DGPh), the ADC (Art Directors Club), and BFF Professional. Follow her on Instagram, RA, and SoundCloud, and visit her website.

Carla-Isabella Dunger is a writer at Hinterhaus, a subculture worker, and an aspiring music and culture journalist whose work centers FLINTA* visibility within the scene. She is co-founder of the FLINTA* Roundtable, organises events at the Golden Pudel Club, and is active as a DJ.

Words: Carla-Isabella Dunger

Edits: Alexander Cheves

Images: Courtesy of the artist