Meg Stuart—What Holds Us

In the videos Meg Stuart directs her poetic and imaginative sensibility toward the body centred around desolate landscapes of undefined spaces, brutalist architectures in decay, strangely familiar environments, [...] Through an ongoing dialogue between body and space, the membrane of presence and its worldly conditions and potentials is set in display. Her work seeks out the uncanny, ambiguous space not as a subject but as an anchor, and shows how a person intersects and negotiates internally with an entire world that carries and has shaped that person and which in turn is simultaneously negotiated and shaped. The building of Ebensperger, a Berlin bunker whose political history is potent, and whose space proposes a disorienting travel, is equally inviting to ›collect‹ the space itself within its material conditions by a collective body of actions, [...] Stuart has never taken the architecturally bounded, codified theatre space for granted, she rather illuminates that stage by transforming its codifications. [...] Working in the public sphere, out of theatre, [...] brings something into being that surpasses the opposition of private and public, art space and living space. The dialectic [...] has in this respect found its habitat: in the real world, the ›Umwelt‹.

(Text: Isabelle Pauwelyn)