Speech at the opening of the exhibition
Nele Ströbel / Medusa raft – of nomads and medusas

It is always projects – often international – that Nele Ströbel pursues and works on over a longer period of time – such as the theme “Nomad”, which the artist dealt with as early as 1994 in the context of an exhibition at the artothek Munich.

Today we are pleased to show an extension and condensation of the theme, which is also a preview for her exhibition next year at the Rathaus Galerie in Munich.

The theme of nomadism has accompanied human history from the beginning and is becoming increasingly important in the present with the increasing scarcity of resources. Nele Ströbel connects the phenomenon with the topic of mobility in general, which is based on the available resources, and meditative pilgrimage in particular. In the context of meditative pilgrimage, the artist discovered, among other things, the Pope shoes, which they find in this exhibition several times in different variations in the linoleum print.

The Pope’s shoes stood with many other pairs of shoes in Paris in 2017 as a protest against climate change. The current security situation had prohibited a demonstration during the climate conference. As representatives, people from all over the world had sent their shoes – a very impressive picture.

In her art the artist abstracts and reduces the image: “Traces” are the titles of these works and one associates with the isolated pair of shoes also the footprints of Christ, which have taken a firm place in the Christian iconography of Ascension Day. You can see just with the picture of the pope’s shoes how complex the statements of the exhibits are.

“Steps” is the title of the 16-piece sculpture with the machined shoe lasts. From an abandoned orthopedic workshop, the artist was given all the lasts in Berlin. She carved them back to >healthy feet<, sealed the holes with red wax and arranged them into new groups.
Here the negative downside of the globalized world – there the spiritual perspective.

The well-known author and psychoanalyst Wolfgang Schmidbauer asks questions such as: “The globalized consumer society must fail. Therefore, shouldn’t we do everything possible to prepare ourselves mentally and emotionally for the improvisation of life rafts?”

Inspired by the tragic story of ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, by French painter Théodore Géricault, Schmidbauer shows his readers how society today can be better than the crew of the ‘Medusa’ over 200 years ago. The captain had ignored all warnings at the time and steered the frigate onto a sandbank. Then the officers claimed the far too scarce space on the lifeboats and promised to tow the rest of the passengers ashore on a hastily constructed raft – and broke their promise. The raft was a lie of the powerful: Starvation, cannibalism, and furious fighting over the remaining resources led to disaster. Wolfgang Schmidbauer shows surprising parallels to our own way of dealing with the existential crises of the present – the passengers on the wobbly raft: that’s all of us.

But we also know the “Medusa” from Greek mythology. Perseus, who had beheaded the daughter of the sea god, and in science Medusae are called hydras, which are important in stem cell research. Of course, we also know about the jellyfish, which we have complained about especially in this hot summer, they take over the so important early warning function for our waters.

However, all these associations and themes do not stand eclectically in space in this exhibition. Nele Ströbel knows how to connect the great complex themes with her own artist’s life – or rather, she draws them from her personal experience: Ströbel herself is a “nomad” in the broadest sense; in addition to her numerous long-distance travels, she lives and works in Berlin and Munich, which is a particular challenge for her artistic work as a sculptor.

Ströbel expands the view from the personal feeling and experience of mobile existence into the past and the socio-political present. She transforms her findings into autonomous artworks whose complexity allows and provokes new associations. The paradigm shift between private and public space is a core theme of her multimedia installations.

The art of Nele Ströbel challenges us to think things, circumstances, condemnations in a new way. In her installations she deconstructs and neatly mixes up individual aspects. In this way, she encourages the viewer to reconsider the familiar and overcome condemnations.

As a sculptor, Nele Ströbel has little interest in genre boundaries. She understands her artistic work as acting in this world, in the world in front of the mirror and the screen. Her artistic “aggregate states” emerge and become tangible in the present space, in the space of the factual-political now.

Gudrun Pamme-Vogelsang
Cologne, September 2018