Based on film excerpts and photographs, the artist Sandra Schäfer will present aspects of the book Contested Landscapes in conversation with the curator Stephanie Weber.
Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regions—their landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra Schäfer and those of the photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, an area in Germany shaped by farming and mining. A hundred years ago, Sander captured his series of peasants there including the artist’s relatives. Schäfer's “homecoming” is represented in the book by three works dealing with the changes of the landscape, its farming, and Sander’s photographs, as well as amateur ones from Schäfer’s family. Contributions from Schäfer’s interlocutors reflect on how these ghosts from the past appear in her work. Further artists and architects will explore rural cultivation in Thuringia, southern Sweden, Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Syria, and southern Colombia from a feminist perspective and with a view to the processes of the global economy. The book therefore also takes up the pressing question of how agricultural production could be rethought within capitalism.
The book is published by Archive Books (Berlin) and Camera Austria (Graz).
The artist Sandra Schäfer deals with the production of urban, rural and geopolitical space, history, and visual politics. Often her works are based on researches, in which she is concerned with the margins, gaps and discontinuities of our perception of history, political struggles, urban, rural and geopolitical spaces. Her works were exhibited at 66th and 67th Berlinale (Forum Expanded), Berlin; Visions du Réel, Nyon; at Camera Austria, Graz; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; mumok, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Depo, Istanbul; La Virreina, Barcelona; Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe. Schäfer also is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and an associated member of the feminist film distributor Cinenova in London. Together with Marina Martinez-Mateo, Rime Abd Al Majeed and Manuela Unverdorben, she is realising the artistic-philosophical research project Disignorance - Seeing in the Racist Fog Field as part of the Research Network for Contemporary Analyses, Memory Practice and Counter-Strategies to Right-Wing Extremism in Bavaria (ForGeRex). www.mazefilm.de
Stephanie Weber is an art historian and has been working as a curator for contemporary art at the Lenbachhaus in Munich since 2014. She previously worked as assistant curator in the Department of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
At the Lenbachhaus, Stephanie was responsible for the exhibitions Senga Nengudi. Topologies (2019), Group Dynamics. Collectives of Modernism (2021, collectively curated), Stephan Dillemuth (2018), Rosemary Mayer. Ways of Attaching and most recently Natascha Sadr Haghighian (2023). She sees her curatorial approach as materialistic, in that art production, process and social environment are seen as interwoven and dialectical.
Together with Karin Althaus and Adrian Djukić, she is currently preparing an exhibition and text anthology on the anti-fascist politics of surrealism, understood as an international(ist) and ongoing process.