Franziska Stünkel (b. 1973 in Göttingen) is a German film director, screenwriter and photo artist. She travels around the world with her camera looking for still authentic places. Wherever she is, Africa, Asia, or Europe, she catches fragile motives in the shop window reflections. Stünkel brings two parallel worlds together, sometimes so different that one could hardly imagine that there is only a thin window glass between them. Another paradoxical thing about Franziska Stünkel’s art is her ability to transform highly figurative motives into abstraction. Material objects sometimes lose their materiality in her works and tend to become symbols. Through window reflection, some objects are deprived of their original context and become isolated. There is something very ephemeral in her artwork; colors and structures receive transparency through the reflection and symbolize the fragility of our life.The dimensions and quality of her artwork allow a viewer to enter another reality. No matter on which continent Stünkel creates the image, she manages to depict something very familiar and very estranged at the same time. Her photography is candid photography of life and our surroundings.
Stünkel attended the Art College in Kassel and the Academy for Fine Arts in Hannover. She studied filmdirecting and selected photography as her minor. After graduating, she honed her craft as a student of the acclaimed German director and university professor Uwe Schrader. She finished with a diploma and received her Meisterschüler, master of art. Non-university, the Danish Dogma screenwriter Mogans Rukov (Das Fest / Festen) coined the cinematic work of Franziska Stünkel. He was her lecturer on the ‘Talents 2003’ scholarship. As a participant of the ‘Berlinale Talent Campus’ Franziska Stünkel was taught by other international lecturers.
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