Archived updates

• 01.03.2025

  MARYAM JAFRI I SUSANNE KRIEMANN I SU YU HSIN – DE-CODING THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

  OPENING DAYS OF EMOP
  C/O AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE
  HANSEATENWEG 10
  10557 BERLIN – TIERGARTEN

  2 pm – 3.30 pm

  Moderated by: Franziska Kunze, Head of the Photography and Time-based Media Collection at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

  In De-Coding the Ecological Crisis, three artists have their say, who in their work deal with the ecological crises of the present, sometimes over long periods of time. In their research-based processes, they are not interested in recording images of catastrophes and documenting the devastation. Rather, they explore the contexts and processes in which these environmental crises occur and show their effects on people, infrastructures and ecosystems. What strategies do the artists develop to translate the often not immediately visible mechanisms into a visual language? The panel will provide an insight into a subject area that is increasingly developing into a genre of its own in art.

  https://emop-berlin.eu

  Panel in English

• 07.03.2025 - 18.05.2025

  Ray, Rock, Rowan (Being a Photograph)

  Susanne Kriemann, in her radically expanded conception of photography, researches geological periods and challenges the politics of visibility: What could it mean to understand the world as a giant recording system, as a photograph?

  Camera Austria’s exhibition space in the Eisernes Haus (Iron House) forms the backdrop for the project Hey Monte Schlacko, dear Slagorg (since 2024). In the contaminated, exploited landscape of a vacant site for mining ore, there are mosses and lichens interacting with other plants, regenerating the soils alongside rocks; echoing in the scenography is the exhaustion, resistance, and trauma of these anthropocentric geographies. This most recent work dialogues with Susanne Kriemann’s long-term research approach, which focuses on the vegetation of landscapes that uranium mining has left behind: the plants metabolizing these toxic soils bring color to the silk panels of Canopy canopy (since 2018); Wild Carrot, False Chamomile, Ox Tongue (Wilde Möhre, Falsche Kamille, Bitterkraut, since 2016) romp through heliogravures; the radioactive pitchblende (Pechblende, since 2015) exposes autoradiographs and photograms; and X-ray images show skeletons of plants like lupine, fern, and gorse bush (Lupin, fougère, genêt, since 2024). The “library for radioactive afterlife” (since 2015) offers publications with different narratives from the Atomic Age, and it expands Camera Austria’s library while also underscoring Susanne Kriemann’s book-making practice.

  The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language reader published by Edition Camera Austria, which brings together authors who offer a frame of reference for Susanne Kriemann’s work: Siobhan Angus, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Zippora Elders, Daisy Hildyard, Bhanu Kapil, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Lisa Rosendahl. Book design: James Langdon.

  www.camera-austria.at

• 27.08.2024 - 01.09.2024

  PETRIFIED TIMES: ENERGIZING PAST FUTURES

  Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin, DE
  Interventions in the mineral collection
  Tue-Fri, 9.30am–6pm, Sat-Sun 10am–6pm, closed Mon

  Lab talks (in German) on Mon, September 2, 5-8 pm
  Please register: NetzwerkNaturwissen@mfn.berlin

  Today, we are experiencing a turning point in which the most serious consequences of human activity – such as the climate crisis, dwindling biodiversity and ecological destruction – are becoming inexorably and unmistakably apparent. The future habitability of the planet therefore requires new forms of cooperation. As part of the Netzwerk Naturwissen, the project group “Petrified Times: Energizing Past Futures” approaches this topic from the perspective of the two central energy regimes “coal” and “nuclear energy”, which have shaped the history of (post-)industrial societies and the planet. The rocks coal (in the form of charcoal, but also hard coal) and uraninite (pitchblende) represent the industrial revolution on the one hand and the atomic age on the other.
  The project group Petrified Times: Energizing Past Futures consists of Friederike Schäfer (FU Berlin), Elisabeth Heyne (MfN) and Maike Weißpflug (Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management – BASE) and uses these rocks and the raw materials to which they refer (as “stones of impetus”) to make the complex of topics relating to the development of the energy requirements of extractivist and capitalist societies accessible. The project was developed as part of the Netzwerk Naturwissen, an initiative of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and its partners from Berlin and Brandenburg.

• 09.03.2024 - 26.05.2024

  -162°C, 450kg/m³ – Fossil Energy, Fragile Futures

  Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven

  Curated by Lena Johanna Reisner

  For overseas transportation, natural gas must be cooled down to -162°C, liquefied and compressed to a density of 450kg/m³. The different materials and substances that play a role in energy production stand front and centre in the exhibition -162°C, 450kg/m³ – Fossil Energy, Fragile Futures. It explores ongoing dependence on fossil fuels, environmental devastation, and the urgent question of securing a liveable future for everyone.

  Wilhelmshaven is currently a locus of German “energy security”, which is being tackled at an unprecedented speed labelled Deutschlandgeschwindigkeit. It was here that, in 2022, Germany’s first terminal for importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) opened, and thus far it has been receiving shipments primarily from the US. This LNG terminal forms the prelude to a series of infrastructure projects intended to turn the region into a future energy hub. These are accompanied by massive incursions into the local environment and ecosystems, parts of which are protected by conservation law.

  Artists: Ayọ̀ Akínwándé, Ana Alenso, Andrew Castrucci, Marjolijn Dijkman, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Sonja Hornung & Daniele Tognozzi, Pepa Ivanova, Susanne Kriemann, Bram Kuypers, Rachel O’Reilly, Oliver Ressler, Miriam Sentler und Joel Sherwood Spring

• 06.04.2024 - 11.08.2024

  INTO THE WOODS. Perspectives on Forest Ecosystems

  Kunst Haus Wien

  Curated by Sophie Haslinger

  More than ever, the world’s forests have become monuments to the imbalances found on our planet. Forests filter water and air, and supply resources and food. As habitats for the majority of terrestrial animals, forests are beneficial to human health, and, as vital carbon stores, help stabilize the planet’s climate. Logging and the profit-oriented exploitation of woodlands are accelerating the ecological crisis while climate change fuels deforestation.

  Artistic perspectives on various forest regions of the world—from the Amazon rainforest, to the Embobut Forest in Kenya, to the primeval forests of the Carpathians, to the Swiss pine forests, and to local woodlands—address pressing issues surrounding this sensitive ecosystem. On the one hand, the works in the exhibition engage with human influence on the condition and destruction of forests, and, on the other hand, with the collective and symbiotic nature of the forest ecosystem. Into the Woods speaks to reckless deforestation, the effects of forest monocultures, the tensions that exists between economic forest use and sustainable conservation, the financialization of the climate crisis, the threat to woodlands due to global warming, as well as the ecological processes and complex interrelations at the core of the forest ecosystem.

  Artists
  Rodrigo Arteaga, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán, Eline Benjaminsen & Elias Kimaiyo, Alma Heikkilä, Monica Ursina Jäger, Markus Jeschaunig, Isa Klee, Susanne Kriemann, Jeewi Lee, Antje Majewski, Richard Mosse, Katie Paterson, Oliver Ressler , Abel Rodríguez, Diana Scherer, Rasa Šmite & Raitis Šmits

• 01.02.2024 - 29.02.2024

  Note di Sguardi

  Curated by Giovanna Sarti, Sara Bernshausen, Gino Gianuizzi

  Note di Sguardi is a local and international art project in public space. Conceived by the artist and curator Giovanna Sarti it is realized in collaboration with Sara Bernshausen in Berlin and Gino Gianuizzi in Bologna. As an intervention in public space, “Note di Sguardi” is an artistic experiment to link up the neighborhoods in cities that differ in size and character: Zona1 in Cervia, S. Stefano in Bologna, and Pankow in Berlin.
  Every year thirty-six artists, 12 artistic contributions from each city, are asked to select from their photographic archive an image that captures a fleeting moment and has specific meaning within their personal research. In the poster format 70×100 cm, three reproduced images, each from every city, are on display simultaneously for a month in Berlin, in Bologna, and in Cervia.

  Note di Sguardi Susanne Kriemann

• 03.05.2023 - 07.04.2024

  The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project

  curated by Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani

  CCA
  Canadian Centre for Architecture
  Montreal

  The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project is the first of a trilogy of research and exhibition projects produced by the CCA on the medium of photography—between work of art, research tool, and document—as a means to investigate the built environment. In light of the pioneering efforts the CCA has made since its foundation in redefining the role of photography within the field of architecture as well as within research institutions and collections, the project is conceived as a display of open research where works of authors from the 1970s until today—from the CCA collection and beyond—are presented together with unpublished projects, books, publication mock-ups, interviews, and documents connected to the production of the works themselves.

  The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project embraces the idea of the documentary as an embedded quality of photographic language, and questions the relevance and actuality of photography as a means to interrogate and interpret the mechanisms that are modelling our visible world.

  Authors: Lara Almarcegui; Lewis Baltz; Gabriele Basilico, Stefano Boeri; Bernd and Hilla Becher; Lynne Cohen; Luigi Ghirri; Dan Graham; Jan Groover; Guido Guidi; Naoya Hatakeyama; Takashi Homma; Roni Horn; Douglas Huebler; Annette Kelm; Gert Jan Kocken; Aglaia Konrad; Susanne Kriemann; Sol LeWitt; Armin Linke; Ari Marcopoulos; Gordon Matta-Clark; Richard Misrach; Marianne Mueller; Bruce Nauman; Michael Schmidt; Thomas Struth; Tokuko Ushioda; Jeff Wall; Marianne Wex.

• 20.02.2024 - 24.05.2024

  Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale

  Artistic Director: Ute Meta Bauer
  Co-Curators: Wejdan Reda (SA), Anca Rujoiu (RO) and Rose Lejeune (UK)
  Adjunct Curator: Rahul Gudipudi (IN)

  https://biennale.org.sa

  The title, After Rain, opens up a moment of revitalization and renewal, introducing the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale as a nurturing entity, filled with life, while acknowledging the necessity of water for all forms of life that dwell and seek shelter on our planet. Unfolding as a combination of practices such as inhabiting, cultivating, harvesting, searching, and sharing, this Biennale presents works that engage with the human-nature continuum, examine the built environment, observe the state of our surrounding landscapes, recount histories, and encourage us to listen more closely. Conceived as a vital entity rather than a static framework, the Biennale welcomes processes, dialogues, performances, and communal meals. The Biennale is a process shaped by first-time meetings and collaborations

• 02.02.2024 - 13.04.2024

  …that creeps from the earth

  curated by Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

  TAVROS

  www.tavros.space

  A historical beginning is a cut—a cut in the flow of history that sections out a before and an after. In histories of the nuclear age, the cut lies in the summer of 1945, on July 16, in a desert in New Mexico, when the first atomic bomb exploded. That cut is resolutely precise. Yet it fails to account for beginnings and ends that are more fleeting, volatile. Turning our attention to the material foundation of nuclear technologies—uranium—opens the possibility for more historical open-endedness. Fathoming the very materiality of nuclear technologies takes us toward terrains of uranium extraction and their lingering aftermaths. That is, not toward the scene of exception—aka the bomb—but rather closer to what Lauren Berlant (although unconcerned in this case with nuclearity) deems “crisis ordinariness”: when an environmental phenomenon does not engender “the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis implicitly calls for.”[1] To places and times where “closing is not closure.”[2] Simply put, the closing of nuclear facilities, especially mines, does not equal the closure of the workings of nuclear matter. Histories of the nuclear age should also be studied via less linear conceptualizations of time, taking into account flows, longevity, sequences, loops, open-endedness. This not only allows one to veer from canonical narratives of nuclear history; it also lays bare the longer history of nuclear violence as explored in the exhibition …that creeps from the earth.

  Text: Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

  [1] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 101. With the term “crisis ordinariness”, Belrant, writing from the US and the UK, refers to how decades of neo-liberal governance have worn deep grooves of precarity and inequality.
  [2] Jens Ashworth, Notes Made While Falling (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2020), 95.

  Artists:
  Inas Halabi, Susanne Kriemann, Sandra Lahire, Sharon Stewart, Valinia Svoronou. The exhibition is accompanied by archival material from the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

• 31.08.2023

  Hemdflannel “G” (Shirtflannel “P”)

  talks and discussion

  Floating University
  Lilienthalstraße 32
  10965 Berlin

  18.00 Arrival
  18.15 Introduction (DE/EN)
  18.30 Dominique Hurth (EN)
  18.50 Bethan Hughes (EN)

  19.10 Break

  19.20 Dr. Insa Eschebach: Lost Environments? Fallows in the Surroundings of the Ravensbrück Memorial Site (DE)
  19.40 Susanne Kriemann (DE)
  20:00 Discussion

  Starting from Berlin Artistic Research fellow Dominique Hurth’s long-term artistic research on the female guard uniform, her own weaving experiments, and the intertwined histories of forced labor and violence within the production of fabric and yarn in Ravensbrück, this public event will bring together inputs by artists Susanne Kriemann and Bethan Hughes as well as by historian Dr. Insa Eschebach (former director of the memorial of Ravensbrück). Continuities between the agricultural experiments of the SS and environmental movements of the post-war period will be discussed as well as shadows within ecological and biodynamic practices, the presence and visibility of creeping violence in landscapes, herbs and plants and current practices of memorial politics.

  Free admission