Archived updates

• 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

• 16.09.2023 - 18.01.2024

  Image Ecology

  curated by Boaz Levin

  C/o Berlin

  co-berlin.org

  Images of the impact of the climate crisis reach us daily: flooded valleys and coasts, burnt homes, melting glaciers, devastated industrial landscapes, often taken from a birds-eye perspective. Nevertheless, climate change remains strangely hard to grasp. A new generation of photographers is therefore looking for new ways to address the climate-damaging consequences of a global technical profit-oriented system. For the first time, they are also examining the ecological consequences of photography itself. Photographic images not only show waste, but produce waste themselves. Photography itself consumes resources and does not only depict resource consumption. It presents ecological problems in images, but is itself partly an ecological problem as a network of consumption, labor, energy, material, transport. With a global perspective, the exhibition Image Ecology provides an overview of the current artistic approaches involving the environment and photographic practices that are related to it. The presented works are not only objects of representation but also reflect the ecology of making pictures.

   

• 21.09.2023 - 21.01.2024

  MINING PHOTOGRAPHY. THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF IMAGE PRODUCTION

  curated by Esther Ruelfs and Boaz Levin

  Gewerbemuseum Winterthur

  https://www.gewerbemuseum.ch

  At the exhibition, historical photographs, contemporary artistic positions and interviews with experts tell the story of art photography from the perspective of its industrial production. Where, for example, did the copper come from that was used for Hermann Biow’s famous daguerreotype of Alexander von Humboldt? Showcasing 170 works, the exhibition impressively illustrates how, ever since its invention, the medium of photography has contributed to man-made changes in nature – and continues to do so to this day. From the very outset, the production of photographs has depended on the extraction and exploitation of natural raw materials. In the 19th century, salt, copper and silver were used to create the first images on copper plates and for salt prints. Following the advent of silver gelatine prints, the photography industry became the most important consumer of silver in the late 20th century, accounting for more than half of global consumption. Today, in the age of smartphones and digital photography, image production relies on rare earths and metals such as coltan, cobalt and europium. The storage of images and their dissemination also produce large quantities of CO2.

  Ignacio Acosta, Eduard Christian Arning, Lisa Barnard, Hermann Biow, F&D Cartier, Klasse Digitale Grafik – HFBK Hamburg (Mari Lebanidze, Miao ‘Cleo’ Yuekai, Leon Schweer und Marco Wesche), Oscar und Theodor Hofmeister, Susanne Kriemann, Honoré d’Albert de Luynes und Louis Vignes, Jürgen Friedrich Mahrt, Mary Mattingly, Charles Nègre, Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio (Lauren Bon, Tristan Duke und Richard Nielsen), Madame d’Ora, Lisa Rave, Hermann Reichling, Alison Rossiter, Daphné Nan Le Sergent, Robert Smithson, Anaïs Tondeur, James Welling, Noa Yafe, Tobias Zielony