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Stefanie Unruh: Works
Texts (German/English) by Detlef Hoffmann, Rasmus Kleine, Karl Borromäus Murr, Sophie Charlotte Opitz, Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, interview with the artist by Stefanie Rosenthal
160 p with 126 coloured illustrations
270 x 205 mm, softcover with dustjacket
ISBN 978-3-86442-329-1
How a tramway cottage becomes a ballroom
In her new book, Stefanie Unruh offers a kind of interim assessment of her work in the period from the year 2000 to the present. Carla Schulz-Hoffmann has described the core of the Munich-based artist’s work as follows: »In large, themat- ically coherent work complexes, she explores one of the key questions of artistic existence, its position within its respective history.« Unruh thus negotiates questions of identity, examines traces and memories, everyday actions and situations, while nevertheless placing reality in a somewhat surreal light. Her examination of the myths of everyday life is profoundly influenced by her interest in media phenomena. In 2005/2006, Stefanie Unruh quite skillfully expanded a subtle series of floral black-and-white patterned wallpapers with drawn portraits, so that only upon closer inspection do the photographic sources come to mind again: it is Mohammed Atta and his accomplices and the famous picture of Ramzi Binalshibh wearing a turban, who is currently waiting in Guantanamo for the beginning of his trial for involvement in the 9/11 attacks scheduled for 2021, who emerge from a flower tendril. In 2010, Stefanie Unruh once again picks up on the relationship between the floral and motifs referring to Islamism in simple and effective ink drawings: Out of the sweet ornamentation, in keeping with aniconism
in Islam, the »uniform« of the burka emerges like a foreign object; one of the women furthermore wields a pistol in her hand. Drawing as a recurring point of departure in Stefanie Unruh’s work, however, marks just one of her abilities in terms of media – equally masterful is her work with objects and video installations with which she makes her frequently requested contribution to current debates on the occupation of public spaces. In doing so, she often inverts their formal connotations: A representative foyer is turned into a dark cave, a tramway shelter mutates into a ballroom.