Luise Schröder - Strömungen in Bewegung

Fotohof Editions 2025

"Women, do you know why we've gathered here today? It's about the upheaval of society as a whole."

Even 30 years after German reunification, the experiences of women's and lesbian groups in the GDR remain largely unknown. They represent a historical void, both in relation to the narratives of the Cold War and in relation to a pan-German women's history. In Luise Schröder's artistic works, photographs, videos, and publications, the way she deals with history and memory, as well as their significance for the present, repeatedly plays a key role.

Based on her East German biography (born in 1982 in the former GDR), the artist's publication "Currents in Motion" explores, both in content and aesthetic terms, the often forgotten activities of non-governmental women's and lesbian groups, as well as queer people, in the GDR in the 1980s and 1990s. She focuses on partially previously unpublished images and texts from the GrauZone holdings of the Robert Havemann Society's GDR Opposition Archive and the Spinnboden Lesbian Archive.

By processing and defamiliarizing the archival materials subjectively and from an artistic perspective, she not only addresses historical gaps but also illuminates the significance of archives as powerful institutions in the context of remembering and forgetting. Furthermore, Luise Schröder explores the poetry inherent in archival materials. Buried and utopian moments inherent in history are highlighted through the selection, processing, and defamiliarization of the material. This creates plural perspectives on historical conditions.

In addition to an extensive section of images, the publication includes a subjectively fictional text in which the artist discusses her screening and selection processes and thus the logic of constructing history. Author and sociologist Judith Geffert, who co-curated the traveling exhibition "Together We Are Unbearable – The Independent Women's Movement in the GDR," wrote an accompanying text for the publication that provides a historical context for its background. The publication also includes a 28-page, newly compiled reprint of "Frau Anders" (Frau Anders), the only lesbian magazine in the GDR, which served as a networking and information exchange platform between lesbian groups and individual women.

"Currents in Motion" illuminates the complex relationship between history and the present, between truth and fiction, between the private and the public, and equally addresses strategies of feminist self-empowerment and practices of resistance with a view to East German women's historiography.

Luise Schröder (*1982 Potsdam) lives and works in Germany and France.

softcover 31 × 22.5 cm, 332 pages
∞ color illustrations
∞ black and white illustrations
Inserted brochure, 28 pages
Print run: 500
Text: Luise Schröder, Judith Geffert
Languages: German, English

Design: Anika Rosen
ISBN: 978-3-903334-83-0