ABOUT THE MEMORY OF PICTURES - Staedt. Galerie Gladbeck (translated from german)

Photography is the medium of our time which is capable to safe remembrances permanent in pictures,
like a visual memory .It is, as Roland Barthes formulates, the held river of time. It allows a moment to
become manifest which was just transitory visible, due to the passing time. Seen this way every
photographic shot serves as a storage, which represents the absent. Moreover, photography owns the
potential of construction of reality and of alteration of perception . Also the artists shown in this exhibition
do not only show reality as seen; they rather understand the splinters of the has-been‘ as fragments of
the world and catch them. Their photographs do not only construct remembrance, but provide the collective
memory with images, which exist in this form exclusively through the camera. The „Memory Of Pictures“, as it is
inherent in the photographies of Steinfeld, is solely a trace of the visible world. Whilst the works exceed the pure
factual description, they provide the spectator with the possibility to „experience time and reflect about human
existence in condensed form“. Now and then perspectives are opening which deviate from the present reality
known to us. Hubertus von Amelunxen states in this context „the history of photography (...)is the history of
falsified testimonies (...)“. So the photo as memory can indeed fix the present and preserve „the moment of
disappearance“, as Baudrillard states, nevertheless it is to be thought of that, „in the synthetic picture (...)
the real has already disappeared“.

It is her, and it is not her. For her photographic stagings Daniela Steinfeld arranges herself in plastic-bags
or- tubs,in cardboard-boxes or underneath carpets. Nylon-stockings, synthetic foil, insulating foam and
upholstery are functioning as props. Sometimes one recognises the artists shape underneath the camouflage,
for she uses, as protagonist of her grotesque-absurd sceneries, her own body as plastic material.
Then again her body-contours seem to dissolute; the rather amorph forms stay faceless. Merely singular parts -
a fist, arms, legs - are to be anticipated underneath the fabric. In such a way the visible extremities become
abstract elements of the picture construction. She succeeds in using the own body - which becomes the
alienated carrier of expression of the photographic self-stagings - and the camera as equal artistic means.
Through the mingling of human body-fragments with artificial elements a world of images comes into being
which is characterized by staging and simulation. Daniela Steinfelds works are settled in an intermediate zone
between performance and visual art. The relation of performance and result is deferred, as the arrangements
are only existent for a moment: virtually of a temporary nature, they obtain permanence in the picture.
What happens in Steinfelds photographic stagings ultimately withdraws itself from any plausible explanation,
as they now and then turn out so dense that they get the quality of metaphors without losing their cryptic wit.

Dirk Steimann ,Catalogue Stationen‘, Staedt. Galerie Gladbeck 2002


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