Gabriele Stötzer Body gestures and bodily signs | Photography

With her artistic self explorations and self-assertions, Stötzer has been acting as a political activist, visual artist, and a writer since the late 1970s and asserted herself time and again against cultural, social as well as political resistance.  

Using various media beyond photography such as drawings, ceramics, textiles, performance, films, and writing, Stötzer's work is directed not only against an erasure of the individual personality pursued by the GDR political system at the time, but also against common gender roles and cultural norms. She staged herself and other female protagonists in front of the camera and developed an idiosyncratic form of artistic practice that identifies photography as a performative act.

Her "dishonest way of photographing", as Stötzer herself puts it, follows an almost unconsciously self-creative act. Through self-experimentation, the artist found her way to performative photography — always in collectiveness and collaboration with other woman — "With them I can also add up, potentiate, alienate, and get from the individual [...] to the general analysis of our being."

She also relates to her images as "touch photos". Stötzer makes physical bodies speak by weaving her figures into social sculptures that act like mysterious sign systems speaking from the image into space and ultimately into our lives.  

Film screening "Expulsion from Paradise" (1984) & "Trisal" (1986)

THU 09.02. | 7 PM  

Presentation of the exhibition catalog

THU 02.03. | 7 PM  

Artist talk Moderated by Angelika Richter

THU 16.03. | 7 PM  

Film screening & talk "Rebel women | Photography. Underground. GDR" (2022) With Pamela Meyer-Arndt (director), Gabriele Stötzer, Tina Bara

Moderated by Franziska Schmidt

THU 30.03. | 7 PM  

Guided tour with the artist

SUN 16.04. | 4 PM