The artist worked under a regime that could – and did – imprison her for her art. In the current strange climate of censorship, algorithmic surveillance and resurgent authoritarianism, her work finds new, rarefied air
Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series Stegreifspiele – Das Loch (Improvisation Games – The Hole, 1982) begins with the artist posing nude in front of a white wall, raising one hand to her face and forming a small circle between her thumb and index finger, like the sight of a gun. It moves across her body, from her mouth to her crotch, then to her chest, before the final image shows her keeling over, as if she’s been mortally wounded. In this sequence, Stötzer literalises the violence of the German Democratic Republic’s Schießbefehl: the shoot-to-kill order that authorised border guards to fire on citizens attempting to flee the state.
By the 1970s, VALIE EXPORT and Carolee Schneemann were iconoclasts of feminist body politics within a patriarchal but functioning Western art establishment; for the lesser-known Stötzer, working under a regime that could and did imprison her for her art, bodily transgression was one of the most immediate forms of resistance against the GDR’s crackdown on artistic expression and political dissent. Her strategies of self-exposure and civil disobedience first drew the Stasi’s attention in 1976 when, in her mid-twenties, she signed a petition protesting the expatriation of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, who had been stripped of his GDR citizenship for publicly criticising the regime. Refusing to withdraw her signature, Stötzer was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for ‘state defamation’. After the GDR’s collapse, in 1990, she returned to Stasi’s Erfurt remand prison to make the short film Zelle 5 (Cell 5, 1990): revisiting the cell in which she was imprisoned to confront and reclaim this history. The film is now part of Gropius Bau’s circa 150-work exhibition of her art.
We start with her 1980s Super 8 films, made with the women’s art collective Exterra XX (formerly Künstlerinnengruppe Erfurt). As Stötzer had been barred from exhibiting publicly and excluded from state-run art institutions, the films were instead privately screened in studios and underground venues, circulating through informal networks. Some are brazenly explicit, like one of a squirting vulva. Others are of the collective’s avant-garde fashion shows. Taken at face value, the films endorse a utopian, disalienated form of gendered and sexual pleasure; read another way, these are anarchically charged declarations of bodily sovereignty.
Another room spotlights Stötzer’s frenetic ‘scribbles’, which spill across various photographs, ceramics, textiles and even her own body and face. A wall text suggests that these marks were made through a kinetic, associative process – though these can often feel more volatile than playful. Take, for one, the photo series Verschmelzung (Fusion) from Frauen Miteinander (Women Together, 1983), in which images of two nude women are worked over with black ink until the works progressively envelop each body in near-total darkness. In another, Urfrauengalerie (Ur-Woman’s Gallery, 1984), an elderly woman in an Erfurt hospital is similarly overpainted in black and white until her face dissolves into abstraction.
Thankfully these bleaker works are leavened by the crudely painted pages, filled with doodles and poems, housed in a neighbouring vitrine. Some recall the kabbalistic glyphs of Anna Mendelssohn, another multihyphenate artist imprisoned for her political militancy during the 1970s. Both women, too, attempted to invent their own alternative alphabets: Stötzer’s being likely a pointed jab at the Stasi’s obsession with deciphering hidden messages. Elsewhere, though, the games turn sexual and considerably riskier. For Trans sitzend (Trans Sitting, 1984–85), Stötzer enlisted the help of a male Stasi informant she nicknamed Winfried, sent to manipulate her into making pornography – grounds on which she could be charged with a crime. Stötzer, however, turned the trap around by dressing Winfried up in women’s hosiery and heels, documenting the result.
In the current strange climate of censorship, algorithmic surveillance and resurgent authoritarianism, maybe we should look to Stötzer’s grassroots interventions as a model for resisting our own creeping loss of privacy. Though some efforts were less successful than others – like the shortlived Galerie im Flur and the condemned building she used as a squat and makeshift photo lab – Stötzer’s handmade Künstlerbücher (artist’s books) and samizdat (the dissident literature circulated through the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc) harnessed the mediums’ portability and discretion to evade the Stasi’s watchful eye. Tellingly, perhaps, the show’s title – Dabei sein und nicht schweigen – translates literally as ‘being there and don’t remain silent’, but the emphasis here has been placed on ‘Showing Up’. That Stötzer was willing to do so is, ultimately, her greatest gift to us.
Gabriele Stötzer Dabei: sein und nicht schweigen (Showing Up and Not Remaining Silent) is on view at Gropius Bau, Berlin, through 6 December
From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
Read next ‘Funny, Sexy and Alarming’: Carolee Schneemann’s Holy Trinity
