Berlin Wall<\/a>, I found myself behind yet another set of walls,\u201d she said, adding that she was lucky to have been young enough to find it interesting and to put that curiosity to use. \u201cOur cell held 20 women \u2026 and we worked a three-shift schedule during the day. Art was bound up in my dream of another life.\u201d<\/p>\nSt\u00f6tzer has been active for years as a contemporary witness and storyteller at Hoheneck, which is now a memorial museum dedicated to the incarceration and persecution of female political prisoners in the communist east. She does not mind being referred to as \u201cEast German\u201d, but balks at being reduced to the label of \u201cGDR artist\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s been celebrated as an eyewitness to history but until now has never been celebrated as an artist in her own right \u2013 and this is what this show seeks to rectify,\u201d said Julia Grosse, who curated the exhibition along with Christopher Wierling.<\/p>\n
In preparation for it, they visited St\u00f6tzer in her Erfurt flat, where her kitchen doubles up as her atelier, and where she had been storing her work in every available nook and cranny.<\/p>\n
Photographs by Gabriele St\u00f6tzer. Photograph: Gropius Bau<\/p>\n
In contrast to other artists and intellectuals in the GDR, St\u00f6tzer refused to be bought out of the east by the West German government, considering that it would allow the anti-capitalist regime to profit from her protest. She stayed, with the intention of using the GDR as an experimental space for artistic fellowship, feminist struggle and solidarity \u2013 just like she had experienced in prison.<\/p>\n
She went underground, lived in a squat and later co-founded a women\u2019s artists\u2019 collective while under the constant surveillance of the East German secret police, the Stasi, which frequently banned the collective\u2019s activities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe made use of everything we experienced \u2013 our dreams, traumas, the exaltation, the humiliation,\u201d she said. At her lowest, she recalls drawing on everything from the furniture, her dishes and wallpaper \u201cso that I could recognise myself, and feel that I existed \u2013 to keep my own substance\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ultimately she believes the collective\u2019s joint resistance helped to reveal not only the state\u2019s repressive methods, but also its weaknesses.<\/p>\n
A drawing from the exhibition. Photograph: Gropius Bau<\/p>\n
She invariably chose to buy Super 8 film rather than sausages, using its soft and grainy qualities to capture expressions of the individuality the state sought to quash, in everything from dancing naked with her friends to orgiastic body painting, the free-climbing of walls, or dressing-up in black refuse sacks and posing in them with the same panache as if they were the latest must-have fashion items.<\/p>\n
Among the exhibits spanning 50 years are woven carpets, drawings, photographs, sculptures made of junk and large scrapbook style albums, which \u2013 as she was forbidden from having exhibitions after refusing to join the GDR\u2019s official artists\u2019 association \u2013 served as a vital way for her to display her work in trusted circles.<\/p>\n
Carolin W\u00fcrfel, a writer with a particular interest in eastern German feminist history, said the exhibition was meaningful to East Germans in particular, because it was \u201crecognition by the official German discourse of St\u00f6tzer, an East German artist, as part of the cultural history of Germany, both east and west.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt finally sends a signal that East German art and culture is not a niche, trapped in a vanished country, but part of our collective memory and our present,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gabriele St\u00f6tzer remembers the days when she had to decide: \u201cAm I buying a sausage, or film for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-768280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}