Stefanie Scheurell

Ruth
›Art or Affinity‹
Showroom LUV, Karlsruhe
Press release, 2005
Lukas Baden

Art or Affinity

The artwork of Stefanie Scheurell, who was born in Berlin in 1980, Germany, is developed from drawings. Her work consist of objects, videos, staged photography, performances and sound-installations. She uses the relationships and affinity between the pieces in order to create presentations within which she combines single works to complex installations that directly address the spectator in a humorous and ironic way. Stefanie Scheurell´s works always relate to the human being. Themes like time, spontaneity, metamorphosis and transitoriness play a major role in this context.

The artist takes all conditions of the exhibition space into account when she sets up her poetic and partially interactive installations on her pursuit of the question of ›Art or Affinity‹. Slide projectors, screens, speakers, drawings, photographs and smells create a synaesthetic memento mori: The artist uses the body and face of her grandmother, which are both marked by the signs of age, to go against her own youth, yet all this is carried out in a tragic-comical way. The whole array of the search for individuality and identity is suspended within this alter-ego relationship through the play of mimics, masquerade and anecdotic narrative. The Installations play with the turning moment: Dignity and misery of age, beauty and transitoriness of youth are set up to yield a personal get-to-know, which in itself leads closer to life.

Lukas Baden