Stine Marie Jacobsen works with video, performance and text. Key themes in Jacobsen’s work are cinema and film, gender archetypes, anonymity, death and violence, as well as their portrayal and presentation in film.
In “Direct Approach”, as in many of her projects, Jacobsen interacts with a wide spectrum of people from various fields of life and work. In Berlin she aimed to discuss the topic of violence, initiating a dialogue with interested participants about their individual perceptions of violence. First, she had the participants recount personal memories of a specific film scene which they had found especially violent or traumatising. Jacobsen then restaged the film scenes in question on the basis of these subjective descriptions. Here, she cast the people she had questioned in place of the actors: victim, witness, violent perpetrator – each participant could choose which of the characters he or she wished to incorporate.
The exhibition “Direct Approach” at Künstlerhaus Bethanien presents three of the video portraits made in this way. They are shown in the form of a weekly changing projection. The artist has also arranged a selection of other film-scene descriptions as text posters in the adjacent room.
Complete reports by all the people Jacobsen spoke to during the project will be published in a book to appear in early 2013, which also marks the end of her long-term project “Direct Approach”.