Stranger in me, each 35x50cm, 2003
A series of self-portraits using the screen-printing technique was created under the thematic motto “Stranger in me”. To depict the inner and outer world by means of alienated self-images.
In life, the foreign is not only the serious case, but above all the normal case. Being afraid of it is evidence of a sensitive disturbance in our self-perception, because when we are conceived and born, we are constantly travelling through new foreign spaces every day, which ultimately have to open up our own dying and make it possible for us to enter them. Even birth releases us from an unbearable symbiosis into an unknown strangeness in which our own life resides. In dealing with the stranger, this surrender must be practised until the last breath, in which the greatest secret of life lies.
Gertraud Knoll
