Gabriela Löffel

The media artist Gabriela Löffel looks behind the scenes–of the financial markets, the film industry, asylum policy, disputes between the state and the private sector, and so on. It would be even more accurate to say that she looks into the scenes, i.e. she seeks insights into the mechanisms, techniques and staging strategies of power, which, in Foucault's words, do not emanate from the actions of individual actors, but can be observed precisely in this performative interplay of self-techniques and system architectures. For example, she deconstructs the supposedly apolitical Performance (1917/18) of a coaching session for speaking skills, which uses a recording of a CEO's speech at an international security congress as material for optimisation, or observes the sealing off of the system on the construction sites of a freeport (Inside 2019) and an asylum centre (Sans titres 2021/22). Löffel repeatedly works with translators and other professionals from the fields of communication, casting and staging. She focuses her attentive gaze on the practice of hidden services. What she uncovers are not the explosive facts of the fields within which her political interests lie, but the subtle forms of powerful realisations. The topics, places and actors that the artist gets up close to, are controversial and her works bear witness to the ‘close observer’ standpoint that she adopts in her research. At the same time, however, she keeps her distance and brings the objects closer to the viewer not in the form of revelations, but as translated material that shifts the usual focus of attention. Rehearsal situations, stages and empty rows of spectators, simulation techniques–the recurring emphasis on the difference to the real situation in Löffel's works contrasts with documentary conventions, but in the Brechtian sense can be attributed to realism, which reproduces ‘the actual reality [that] has slipped into the functional’ (cf. Bertolt Brecht, Der Dreigroschenprozeß 1931). Tracking down the techniques and economies of global powers, Löffel looks closely in all her works: at the narratives, the skilful rhetoric, the interchangeable performers, business premises and marketing strategies. Her artistic approach resembles a kind of habitat research with which she attempts to capture ‘the enormous absence of the political in these complex realities’, as she explains in a conversation about The Case (2015). Her focus on this present absence turns her installations into unsettling spaces for reflection.

Text by Sigrid Adorf