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LINDEN HOTEL, Video Installation by Stefan Roloff The phenomenon of political imprisonment is timeless. Yet, its victims can only speak to us from the past. It is its nature to be silenced in the present. The group of former Stasi- prisoners I interviewed have never before spoken on tape or in public. To remove the boundaries of time I have interviewed them as silhouettes. At first glance, this gives them an air of illegality. The viewer gets the impression that they can?t reveal their identity. Faces can be misleading. Beauty, gender, age, race or other categories disappear when we view a silhouette. What remains is the tone of their voice and their body- language, keys to their subconscious. It is my goal to bring the experiences of former political prisoners into the present and communicate the immediacy they feel. Though they were released from jail decades earlier, their trauma continues to haunt them and - as many of the interviews show ? it extends into the lives of their children. Initially, I projected the talking silhouettes of nine former prisoners on to the walls of their former cells at the Stasi- prison in Potsdam.

Stefan Roloff is an independent artist and film maker, working in New York and Berlin. In 1984, he was invited to experiment on prototypes of digital video and imaging computers at the New York Institute of Technology. Here, he created ?Face?, his first Moving Painting which, produced by Peter Gabriel, was the predecessor of his video ?Sledgehammer?. Subsequently, he continued to combine his paintings and videos in collaborations with musicians. (?Zaar? with Gabriel, ?Dominic Christ? with Suicide, ?Big Fire? with Jazz musician Andrew Cyrille.) From 1989 to 1999, he worked on the documentary film ?Seeds?. Traveling through remote areas of West Virginia, he followed the story of a 22- year old woman who committed suicide in 1981 in an isolation cell at the State Prison for Women. The film was combined with an installation, ?Pence Springs Resort?, a life-size three-dimensional photographic rendering of the isolation cell which the viewers could physically enter. His second documentary film ?The Red Orchestra?, is a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter against the Nazis. It was nominated best foreign film 2005 by the Women Critics Circle. Currently, Stefan Roloff is preparing "Cafe Holland", his first feature film, with Carola Stabe, a former GDR dissident.