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Email PageThe Blind
May 10, 2007- June 16, 2007
Reception: May 10, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Gabriele Stellbaum
Florence Lynch Gallery
531 W 25th StFlorence Lynch Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent videos by Gabriele Stellbaum. The exhibition is on view from May 10 through June 16, 2007. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, May 10, from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
The Blind is a large-scale video installation presented on two opposite walls of the main gallery. The work is adapted from Maurice Maeterlink’s surrealistic theater pieces The Blind.
A group of blind people are lost in the wilderness after their guide, an old priest, has died unnoticed. The blind keep waiting for the return of their guide while the distress about the time, the danger of place, and their possible doom intensifies. Stellbaum has drawn a libretto score from Maeterlink’s drama and written a minimal atonal composition to intensify the oddness of the piece and create a dream-like anxiety. The blind are played by Stellbaum. The characters in the two projections seem to refer to each other, while at the same time creating the sense of one person talking to herself like a poetic lunatic. There is a sharp contrast of the spoken words; images of the blind lost in the forest, and the tone of extreme emotional restraint, in which the words are sung and whispered with stoic facial expressions – which trigger a sense of unreality, making the words shed their customary meaning and generate a vast number of obscure associations. The work explores how we define our world through sight and how the absence of sight redirects our experience of the world though our tactile and auditory senses. Stellbaum integrates slowness into the movements of the blind, who reside in a more or less static position on stage, while their thoughts, expressed through the spoken or sung words create the real drama and the overall sense of isolation and lack of direction.
Two other videos “Remember Me” and “In this Dark” are shown in the cinematic space. “Remember Me,” one of Stellbaum’s first voice works produced in 2006, shows her asking in a pleading/persuasive canon to remember her once she has died. The performative action is centered on a white classical pedestal, which Stellbaum enters, pleads with and finally pushes off the stage. Drawn from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, the artist sings an excerpt of the Dido’s famous death scene, which she repeats, deconstructs and rearranges over and over again for her performance about fame and immortality.
“In this Dark” recalls a dark memory of the aftermath of war. A woman with a child in her arms recites, “I am the enemy you killed my friend…” Pain ridden she holds her dead child and begins to sing a beautiful sad canon “Let us sleep now…” We don’t know whom she is addressing with her song, while bird voices fill the air. She peers at us until she unexpectedly beats the ground with her fists and the previously beautiful bird voices change into disturbing sounds. The music is a vocal excerpt of Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”.
Gabriele Stellbaum was born in Berlin, Germany, she exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Europe and the U.S. Her video work is in public and private collections in the US and abroad.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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