STOPP Stephanie Trojan

Exhibition at Lothringer Straße 13, Munich.

Some streams of the Sixties' Flower Power obsessions loved to insecure people with behaviour we like as friendly from friends and dislike as a little awkward from others. Stephanie Trojan likes to analyze the underlying conventions of this awkwardness and to play around with them.

In her exhibition at the Lothringer Straße 13 in Munich, that runs until the 21^st october 07, she shows video films, photos and video projections documenting her interventions and performances, that ask meticulously for the reasons of our daily conventions.

In a separated room the visitors can listen to her statements, that explain conventions to cross subjects like „being oneself“, „having bodily contact without sexuality“, „doing something purposeful“. The ideas are quite well known from the Sixties – just think about Valie Export's breast project, when she let any pedestrians on the street touch her breasts - but stefanie trojan is something more bourgeois and otherwise more penetrating. Her performances are very clear in their topics: In „Handgreiflich“ from 2005 she takes at hand any male or female visitors of the exhibition opening „My private Heroes“ and holds their hand for quite a long time, just as if she was a young friend or a child.

In „Smile II“ (Performance „Lebensfreude“ at Luitpold Lounge in Munich, 2005), she ambushes harmless pedestrians to touch their face and lift up their corner of the mouth to build a smile.

It is always the same gesture she performs on different people, and the video film shows quite clearly, that their reaction depends on whether they notice the camera or not. Not everybody is amused or finds pleasure in being forced to smile in this way, of course. But Stephanie Trojan is a nice young woman, who nobody will experience as disgusting or really aggressive. Additionally, her gestures are the kind of familiar touch, we usually know from good friends or family members, as such, unsexual and known as something, we learn to bare even from the not really loved ones in this circles. The performance „Kleiderspende“ („Donation of Clothes“) that took place at the annual exhibition at the Academy of Arts in Munich, is perhaps the only project that left the scope of friendliness and developed to something more sexual. Trojan presented herself naked in the beginning of the show, to force other people to dress her with their own clothes. Quite interestingly, the exhibition opening's female visitors did not react at all. Instead, the first male visitor who had pity, reacted quite extremely with offering her his undertrouser, that he had of course to put off in public. Later, she became clothed with widly oversized trousers and, lovely fitting or not, decorated with a belt showing the symbols of „Hammer und Sichel“ (hammer and sickle). Not considering the undertrouser, the „Kleiderspende“ was quite similar to the other performances, stressing the limits of distance, friendship and Körperlichkeit, and in its intention more pre-sexual than the real performance was allowed to be.

The childishness of Stephanie Trojan's art is, thus, both power and weakness. Friendlyness just as holding somebodies hand can of course be discussed as sheer friendliness and care, not flashy – just think about the usual behaviour in religious groups. We might be more disposed to allow a nun to grasp us into the face and lift our lips than to anybody we might project a sexual interest on. As such, the focus of Stephanie Trojan's performances is in a way placed just one step beyond the topics that need art badly.

Reports and photography: Dr. U. Ritter