Susanne M. Winterling’s work in her films, photographs, collages and installations critically engages the representation of realities. Prevailing modernistic concepts, gender power structures, and hierarchical historiographies are captured in her works, with an eye for the repressed, and investigated for their validity.
In her work, she repeatedly focuses on individual, significant but rather periphery, figures in shared historical memory like the architect Eileen Gray in the installationThe Jewel and Troubled Water(2008) in the coat check areas of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Winterling’s site-specific approach is clear in this work. Her installations often make reference to the rooms and contents of the building in which they are on display. In a complex mesh of references between the differing concepts of Gray, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, the artist mirrors and exposes blemishes in the history of modernistic architecture.
Another distinctive feature of Winterling’s work is the probing of the limits of the medium being used. In her 16mm films, she captures the everyday gestures and movements of things in such a way that they can, due to their haptic quality and sensitive presentation, enter into an equitable dialog with the actual things in the room.
