Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Citizen’s Handbook, 2004

In her videostills of everyday scenes in public spaces Katja Stuke isolates fleeting moments from their contexts and suspends them, unanchored, in front of an audience. The images, which have the harsh and distant quality of surveillance camera footage, have an uncanny feel to them. They are paired with Olivier Siebers’ portraits of residents in both a high rise apartment block in Berlin and a housing estate in Düsseldorf. The photographs together address the unstable line between public and private, interior and exterior, and intimate and anonymous life in an uirban setting. Texts in German by Martin Sokol.