“This is no game. Here there is no interlude. To disillusion you, we don’t need illu- sion. We don’t play fate. We don’t play any dreams. We don’t play out any plot.” What Peter Handke introduced in 1966 in his stage play “Offending the Audience” applied equally for the space behind the stage: the backstage area. Here, too, there is no game. There is no alienation effect, no acting-as-if, no public realm. In the backstage area, the roles are abandoned. This area is more honest, more authentic, maybe somewhat dirtier and at the same time more exclusive. For her exhibition, Stef Heidhues chose the title Backstage with the Modern Dancers. Applied to Heid- hues’ works, “Backstage” also means that nothing is pretended. Her minimalistic approach makes it possible from the beginning to negate media deceptions and the promises of the pictorial world. The steel pipe is no fable animal; the rubber and the fluorescent tubes don’t disguise themselves.
Excerpt from the press text by Larissa Kikol, translation by Mitch Cohen