MICHAELA MEISE (STÄDELSCHULE, ...
Michaela Meise (Städelschule, Frankfurt) make videos, drawings, watercolours, sculptures out of cardboard or wood and performances. Some of the works are simply about themselves – about the fun of craft. Others deal with identity and the artist’s connections with culture, history, gender.Meise’s video '!!!Sobibor!!!' (2003) centres on a trip to Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland from 1942 to 1943. The place has no ruins, no documents, no proof of what it once was. It is impossible really to ‘enter’ Sobibor.
The artist has also produced a series of sculpture dealing with female identity, trying to handle the subject “without the victimising approach of ‘classical’ feminist art and without the girlish and bitchy attitude of the 1990s”.
ArtReview, July/August 2003