In her video pieces Gabriele Stellbaum creates narratives, fragmented and constructed by emotional, mental and sociopolitical histories. In persisting reciprocity of indication and withdrawal, the sceneries countervail ambiguity as a prevalent but never absolute strategy. The gesture of postponing the clarification on the circumstances defining her plots, opens up the interstitial space for thinking as latency mechanism and structural concept.

Over time, the individual with its burden, desires and inscription in moral framework, emerges from the narrative, revealing its traits and contiguity. Blurring the boundaries of film and theater, her metaphoric use of language accentuates her minimal but precisely calculated mise-en-scenes. These visual dispositions provide innate narrations juxtaposed by passive protagonists. The performers exert minuscule and unspectacular actions that issue into political ones, despite of 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 of sociopolitical responsibilities in the past and the future of an unpredictable changing political landscape.

The sceneries are built upon an intricate layering of threats,  a matryoshkaesque hinting towards what lies in the unobtainable space between the stitches of the stories fabric. Her multifaceted register out of which the artist constructs her distinct imagery, functions as a cabinet of object symbols, reflections, insights and outlooks. The films’ diction implements the ambiguity of what we see – a reality pervaded by an impending danger that designates these poetic tales a notion of inert resistance.

It is a face redrawing from the world,
the color of memory to be written,
the wound of participation in an undesired occurrence,
a sound that reverbs in limbo,
secret histories suppressed and untold,
this time, sometimes, somewhere, somehow.