Stella Geppert – Bist du da?

2 May – 8 July 2007
Opening: Friday, 11 May 2007, 7.30 p.m.

Welcoming speech: Waltraut Steimke, executive director
Introduction: Stefanie Böttcher, artistic director

Stella Geppert's works create whole new surroundings that shift the viewer's perception. She intervenes in public spaces in the most varied of ways, thus providing herself and the recipients of her works with unusual spaces and enabling insight into the resulting fabrics. This often happens at a very subtle level - the artist starts at the borderline to the imperceptible and thus risks that awareness of her interventions remains unconscious. She makes a first approach to the space in question through a series of photographs which she uses so as to access and take stock of the place. In Geppert's case the role of these photographs is to archive her ephemeral oeuvre and so they often function like sketches, in terms both of form and of content. On the basis of these "sketches" and her intense observation, the artist tracks down the place's social significance and inner structures. Over a period of time she goes to that specific place to study her own and other people's activities and movements in it. The resulting documentations of the surrounding reality then constitute the point of departure for her interventions. Geppert captures movements within the place and in doing so addresses the theme of man's place in space, his relationship to it and to objects. All of this refers to just one specific place or situation, it is a single experimental arrangement, an excerpt that has no aspiration to universal validity.
Just as the material point of departure has a performative aspect to it, so too do Geppert's works. By intervening in an existing situation the artist merely provides the occasion for a repositioning and for an interpretation of the changes. Sometimes these are so small as to be scarcely perceptible, sometimes so direct as to rock our perception - Stella Geppet disrupts the momentum, the predictability of familiar surroundings.
For her solo exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Bremen, Geppert has developed an installation that permeates the space. By constructing new spatial levels and using mirror elements to reveal existing structures, she entangles the exhibition visitor in a labyrinth of new sense impressions, causing him to doubt his own standpoint and putting him in a hovering state, between presence and absence.

PROGRAM

3 June 2007, 6 p.m.  Artist talk
21 June 2007, 7.30 p.m. Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt Film by Walter Ruttmann (1927)

Guided tours: 24 May 2007, 7 p.m.; 5 July 7 p.m.