Colonize my mind, Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, 2016
A thin, blue plastic bag carried away by the wind, a suitcase hidden in the trees, inhabited cardboard boxes squeezed in between walls like nests … moments in time that Katrin Ströbel (*1975 in Pforzheim) records in her drawings and photographs. Moments that confront us with signs of those who – involuntarily – are on a journey. Fleeing – maybe. Or maybe just on their way to places where life promises to be better, warmer. In the artist’s videos, these people have faces, have voices. They tell personal stories, accounts which we have not yet heard from the “flood of refugees”-press reports. Stories that for years have already been taking place daily and everywhere in the world – under our very eyes, if we bother to look, as does Katrin Ströbel. But in Ströbel’s complex installations, in which she explores cultural codes, visual language, and sign systems, we find neither accusations nor folklore. Both her pictures and wall-drawings as well as her room-installations consist of a cosmos of imagery that reflects post-colonial history as well as current racism and sexism. In addition, she is constantly concerned with the question as to her own role as an artist and concomitantly with the conditions under which art is practiced in different cultures.
Her long sojourns in Africa, America, and Australia, but also her life between Germany (Stuttgart), France (Nice), and Morocco (Rabat) form the basis for her work. She is a temporary migrant, who as an artist spends her time tracing the movements in different cultural contexts in order to comprehend them in their own, unique, subtle visual languages.
-> Colonize my Mind, text by Andrea Jahn
