Der lange Arm der Stasi Buchkatalog

Artist Gabriele Stötzer was the powerhouse of Erfurt's lively underground. After Wolf Biermann's expatriation in 1976, she herself was held on remand and put in the Hoheneck women's prison. Her one-year imprisonment did not silence her though. After her release, she ran an underground gallery and established a group of female artists. On 3 December 1989, she was the first to occupy the Stasi building in Erfurt together with a collection of like-minded people. More than twenty-five years after the event, Stötzer researched her own past and that of thirty-two fellow artists as recorded in the Stasi archives. She has written a factual report on the forms of observation that were used, exposing the internal logic of the surveillance regime. Her text-which was written for the exhibition Between Withdrawal and Action at the Kunsthalle Erfurt in 2014-is supplemented by original documents from the files and visual material produced by surveillance operatives. Gabriele Stötzer (b. 1953), photographer, author, Super 8 film-maker, and performer, lives and works in Erfurt. Her solo exhibition Bewusstes Unvermögen: Das Archiv Gabriele Stötzer is showing at the Leipzig Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK) in 2019.