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In her video installation “Westerwald: A Visitation”, the Berlin artist Sandra Schäfer - based on August Sander's series of Westerwald farmers - deals with the transformation of the rural region in which the artist herself grew up. Sandra Schäfer juxtaposes August Sander's perspective with her own and contemporary view. For it is also about how a region, its landscape and agricultural use have changed over the course of time. In her artistic work, Schäfer is interested in the various contemporary witnesses and their entanglements: How do the relatives/portrait subjects speak about the (artistic/documentary) pictures by August Sander? What does it mean to hear the dialect that always also marks a class difference? What knowledge is there about the photographer and his approach? How does this differ from that of photo curators in the museum context? And what does it mean for the artist, who was born and raised there, to return to create this artistic work?

The artist Sandra Schäfer works with film and video installations. Therein she deals with processes of unfolding and rereading of documents, images, spatial narratives and performative gestures. Often her works are based on longer researches, in which she is concerned with the margins, gaps and discontinuities of our perception of history, political struggles, urban and geopolitical spaces. Her works were exhibited at 66th and 67th Berlinale (Forum Expanded), Berlin; Camera Austria, Graz; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; mumok, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Depo, Istanbul; La Virreina, Barcelona. Schäfer also is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and an associated member of the feminist film distributor Cinenova in London. She edited the books: Moments of Rupture: Space, Militancy & Film, Spector Books, Leipzig (2020), stagings. Kabul, Film & Production of Representation, b_books, Berlin (2009) and Kabul/ Teheran 1979ff. Filmlandschaften, Städte unter Stress und Migration, b_books, Berlin (2006, together with Jochen Becker and Madeleine Bernstorff).