In her video pieces Gabriele Stellbaum creates narratives, fragmented and constructed by emotional, mental and socio-political histories. In the persisting oscillation between indication and withdrawal, the sceneries contain ambiguity as a prevalent but never absolute strategy.
Over time the protagonists, with their burdens, desires and inscriptions in moral frameworks, emerge from the narrative. Blurring the boundaries of film and theater, Stellbaum’s use of language accentuates her minimal but precisely calculated mise-en-scenes. These intricate visual settings develop into narrations juxtaposed by passive protagonists. The protagonists exert minuscule and unspectacular actions that issue into political ones, without any awareness or intention of doing something of obvious importance.
Starting from the trajectories of social control, personal and public identities, precarity, neuroscience and virtual reality, the work touches on Stellbaum’s concern for socio-political responsibilities in the past and the future.
The sceneries are built through a layering of threads, a matryoshkaesque hinting towards what lies in the unobtainable space between the stitches of the stories’ fabric.
It is a face withdrawing from the world,
the colour of memory to be written,
the wound of participation in an undesired occurrence,
a sound that reverberates in limbo,
secret histories suppressed and untold,
this time, sometimes, somewhere, somehow.
Life: Gabriele Stellbaum
Gabriele Stellbaum was born in Berlin, Germany. She exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Europe and the USA. Her video work is in public and private collections in the US and abroad. Her video work has been reviewed at Artnet.com and Director’s Lounge. Stellbaum is director, producer, script writer and actor for her video works.