BERLIN — The exhibition "Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen" is on display at the Martin Gropius Bau gallery in Berlin. The exhibition, which features 150 of Gabriele Stötzer's works, runs until December 6. Julia Grosse and Christopher Wierling curated the exhibition.

The title, "Dabei Sein und nicht schweigen" (Show up and don't be quiet), is taken from a book Stötzer wrote about her year in prison. Stötzer, who is 73 years old, was incarcerated in the Hoheneck women's prison in Saxony in the late 1970s after protesting against the expatriation of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann.

"Living in a land already cordoned off from the rest of the world by the Berlin Wall, I found myself behind yet another set of walls," Stötzer said. "Our cell held 20 women and we worked a three-shift schedule during the day." The Hoheneck prison now serves as a memorial museum dedicated to the incarceration and persecution of female political prisoners in communist East Germany.

Stötzer co-founded a women's artists' collective while under surveillance by the Stasi, which frequently banned the group's activities. She was also forbidden from having exhibitions after refusing to join the German Democratic Republic's official artists' association and refused to be bought out of East Germany by the West German government.

The exhibition spans 50 years of Stötzer's work and includes woven carpets, drawings, photographs, sculptures made of junk, and scrapbook style albums. Stötzer utilized Super 8 film to capture individual expressions, including scenes of dancing naked with friends, body painting, free-climbing walls, and posing in black refuse sacks.

Stötzer currently lives in an apartment in Erfurt, where her kitchen functions as her atelier. "Art was bound up in my dream of another life," Stötzer said. Curator Julia Grosse said, "She's been celebrated as an eyewitness to history but until now has never been celebrated as an artist in her own right – and this is what this show seeks to rectify."