Deborah Stratman
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control, and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Tabakalera, Austrian Film Museum, Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Berlinale, CPH/DOX, Viennale, Locarno, Yamagata, and Rotterdam. Stratman lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.
Science meets speculative fiction in artist Deborah Stratman’s poetic, associative reflection on evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. Loosely based on two short stories by J.-H. Rosny, considered one of the founding figures of modern science fiction, and thinking with figures from Roger Caillois to Donna Haraway, Stratman troubles the limits of human perception, mining the farthest reaches of the biosphere for (im)material traces that bind past, present, and future.
