The video work Round Around (1996) explores gender as a process produced through repeated gestures and socially conditioned behaviors, rather than stemming from inner essence. The artist appears disguised as a rural island woman, adopting the visual language of ethnographic documentation to evoke and simultaneously reveal ideals of tradition, labor, and natural femininity as constructed conventions. The work functions as an embodied act of substitution, where the artist’s body activates historically accumulated gender norms. The central action features Sterle running in an unbroken circle around a tree until physical exhaustion. This repetition serves as a mechanism for inscribing norms into the body, but also as a space for their destabilization, presenting gender as a closed loop. The tree symbolizes rootedness and natural order, representing biological discourses that legitimize gender roles. The obsessive circling exposes these naturalization processes, demonstrating that what is perceived as “natural” is in fact produced through disciplined repetition.
Sandra Sterle
Sandra Sterle interdisciplinarna je umjetnica sa sjedištem u Splitu i Zagrebu. Njezin rad obuhvaća kreativnu praksu i istraživačke aspekte na području izvedbene umjetnosti, filma i tehnologije unutar konteksta bijele kocke, crne kutije, medija i akademske institucionalne sredine. Predaje video i izvedbenu umjetnost na UMAS-u, Umjetničkoj akademiji u Splitu, te je izlagala i nastupala na raznim međunarodnim lokacijama, poput Muzeja suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb; Kunsthalle Fridericanum, Kassel; Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem; Muzeja likovnih umjetnosti, Split; W139 Gallery, Amsterdam; Museo de Arte & Diseno Contemporaneo, Kostarika; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Instytut Sztuki Wyspa, Gdanjsk; Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; Location1 Gallery, New York; Artist Space, New York itd.
