City as Stage | architecture as art director

I Urbicande  2005
Oil on canvas (300 x 200cm)

Stefanie Bürkle, born 1966 in Heilbronn, is Professor of Fine Art at the TU Berlin. She studied scenography in Paris and Fine Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She worked as a stage designer in Paris at the Théatre des Amandiers & MC 93 Bobigny, in Berlin at the Berliner Ensemble & HAU. Her early work focuses on topics such as "City", "Artificial Worlds", "facade-wallpaper-space architecture", with various media including painting, photography and multimedia projects. Her work reviews the usual perception of the city through new ways of reading projection and the spaces behind it. 

Weltraumpalast  2010

Facade pattern Bundespressekonferenz 1999

The world as a stage and construct by Matthias Harder: 
(Photography as a documentation of urban illusion)
Stefanie Bürkle's photographs of facades and building elements that seem to stand around like abandoned elements in Berlin, act as stage sets and yet are planning a reality. This photographic presentation on the imaging plane is no accident: Bürkle studied painting and stage design, and artistic work in multimedia.The medium of photography uses a documentary style to depict our outer world in detail, an artistic life of its own image in her work.

Potsdamer Platz facade pattern  1995

Bürkle deliberately composed these images, even if some of her pictures seem like spontaneous passer-by snapshots. She works in series, but the work also functions as  a sequence of individual images, of complex urban transfers. Taken together, one might describe  the sequence of facades or images of the city as the construction of a modern long-term report, or a construction site mapping ephemeral architecture. It makes visible and transparent urban planning processes, as exemplified by Berlin's symbolic buildings and locations such as the Reichstag, Palast der Republik, the State Library or Checkpoint Charlie. 

Bürkle uses her photographs to document an over-staged reality. Their view of the city and the architectural interplay is critical and detached, inquisitive and amused at the same time. It is a subversive counter-position against the affirmative image of the tourism authorities.

Reichstag dome  2005

Berlin has already been described in the 1920s as a city in constant change, that would never be finished. This famous bon mot is also here - in passing - visualized. Bürkle shows the German capital in the self-chosen role as a prominent stage situation. The city is transformed  by the backdrop of images of itself.