Escape from Colditz - Papercuts, Collage and Installation

Sat 25 October 2025 - Fri 9 January

Magdalene College

Annette Schröter was trained as a porcelain painter at the German Democratic Republic’s State Porcelain Works in Meissen before studying fine art at the prestigious High School for Graphics and Book Design in Leipzig between 1977-82. Growing up and training in the GDR, much of her work is a response to both the state’s idealised propaganda and the quiet resistance to it that was part of everyday life. She critiques the GDR’s ‘escapist kitsch’— the officially sanctioned, idealised portrayals of rural life that were central to socialist mythology. At the same time, she explores more personal forms of escapism, like artistic practice, gardening, weekend retreats, and traditional handicrafts. These activities offered citizens a form of "inner emigration”, a way to retreat from the harsh realities of environmental depletion, industrial exploitation, and constant surveillance that were part of the daily experience in the socialist state.

Growing up on the edge of Meissen, a small town firmly rooted in the Saxon countryside, Schröter’s motifs are also inspired by the long antagonism in German history between the mythologies and motifs of the land and those of urban/industrial modernity. Arranged in what she describes as ‘family groups’ her papercuts and collages include home-made allotment gates, scarecrows and the glories of summer gardens. The papercuts are complemented by a series of assemblages and small installations that celebrate Schröter’s collections of GDR folk art, handicrafts, popular culture and kitsch – which she uses as visual prompts for her practice.

Schröter’s hugely ambitious papercuts and collages – which she started to produce in 2003 – are drawn from a range of sources, her own (often comically banal) photographs, images she finds in magazines, in the daily press and on television, or those that she imagines inspired by news reports on the radio. Her complex works pose huge questions about the extent to which – even as an artist, independent thinker and in Schröter’s case an opponent of the GDR’s political regime – we are affected by the state’s visual grammar and its iconographic hegemonies.

Exhibition co-curated and co-organised by Silke Mentchen, Magdalene College and Matthew Shaul, Director, Departure Lounge Contemporary Art.

Cost: Free