Sieber, Oliver and Stuke, Katja

In 2013, German artist team Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber visiting Chicago, which spurred Sieber’s memories of his former housekeeper, Indira, a Bosnian woman who had lived in Düsseldorf in the early nineties following the violent expulsion by Serbian nationalists from the former Yugoslavia. One of over 300,000 refugees who sought asylum in Germany, Indira would later immigrate to Chicago, eventually settling in Florida, when her official status as Duldung (the German word for tolerated) was revoked upon the war’s end. Curious about his family’s former housekeeper, Sieber located her on Facebook, tracing Indira’s personal history since arriving in the United States in 1999 as the instantiation of political and historical forces that exceed, but ultimately shape, the individual. Commissioned by the MoCP in partnership with the Goethe Institutes of Chicago and Sarajevo, Stuke and Sieber created You and Me (2014-15), an exhibition exploring the intersections between the personal and political, self and others, diaspora and home, through Indira’s story.