Making love to unknown cities

Julie Crenn

In her conceptual drawings and multimedia installations, Katrin Ströbel (born 1975 in Pforzheim; lives and works in Marseille, Stuttgart, and Rabat) questions the social and geopolitical realities of the present with a simultaneously playful and critical eye. Her archaeology of everyday life pursues the political as decidedly as modern representations of the female body or practices of cultural appropriation ? but also focuses on more private spaces, design objects, and interiors, such as the wallpaper in the studio of the Italian avant-garde artist Dadamaino. The astute negotiation of colonized bodies, spaces, and objects interspersed with cultural codes is reminiscent of Hanna Höch?s early collages. Ströbel lends them her contemporary voice: from the design classic Eames to current gender images to compendia of modern art history, the artist deconstructs Eurocentric culture with a...