Updates

  • 26.11.2024 - 26.11.2024
    Artist Talk: Lupin, fougère, genêt

    On 26 November 2024 at Framer Framed, artist and lecturer Susanne Kriemann presents the latest work from her photographic project Lupin, fougère, genêt, centred on the effects of uranium mining. Building upon her previous project Pechblende, which comprises works on uranium mining in East Germany, Kriemann’s new work shifts focus to the Limousin region in France.

    The title Lupin, fougère, genêt (French for ‘lupine, fern, gorse’) refers to three plants that thrive in Limousin, an area that was the centre of uranium extraction in France during the mid to late twentieth century. When mining activities ceased in the 1980s and 1990s, former mines were flooded, creating artificial lakes that dot the landscape. These waters and surrounding soils still carry traces of radioactive contamination.

    The plants in and around these lakes have absorbed radioactive elements from the environment. They metabolise these contaminants and sometimes even flourish, but they also stand as living witnesses to the lingering toxic legacy of uranium extraction. In her talk, Susanne Kriemann will share her journey of artistic research in this overlooked nuclear landscape, focusing on how these plants act as bearers of radioactive memory and serve as subjects in her photographic work.

    The talk is organised by curator and researcher Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou. It is part of, and supported by, the Environmental Humanities Centre at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The event is presented in partnership with Sonic Acts.

  • 21.10.2024 - 31.12.2024
    HEY MONTE SCHLACKO, DEAR SLAGORG

    Exhibition on the occasion of the AiR Siegen by the University of Siegen and Museum für Gegenwartskunst MGK Siegen, DE
    pedestrian zone downtown Siegen

    e-flux

    Hey Monte Schlacko, Dear Slagorg stretches around the former department store like a metallurgical rind. Large-format prints on partly transparent textiles and papers are attached to the building in different layers. The photographs were taken at different times of the year. They show the flora and fauna that has settled on the gray slag, including many mosses and lichens. Kriemann’s photographs examine the nature of the plants and the slag. Layer by layer, organisms are revealed that are interwoven both metallurgically and botanically. They stand for worlds of life yet to be named, which emerge from the countless slag heaps, clearings and mountains of garbage of consumer society.

    Hey Monte Schlacko, Dear Slagorg brings different layers from the periphery into the center: the sparse flora, the slag from the blast furnaces and the topography of the “Siegen Fujiyama.” The surrounding countryside, the remnants of past industrial production, meet the built mass of an era of consumer culture that is also in a state of upheaval in the city center. For with the materials, furniture and exhibitors left behind in the former Karstadt building, the installation develops into a hybrid being that is not yet precisely defined: Slagorg.

    With its overlays and vistas, the presentation makes direct reference to the architectural structures of the former department store. Béton Brut suddenly resembles bursting slag. Polygonal textile prints on the façade, stretched in niches and in front of the shop windows, meet classic image formats, color photographs on thin paper and projections inside the display cases. Historical photographs from Siegen and recent film footage from Kharkiv (Ukraine) expand this artistic dialog. The archive photographs of rare flowers taken by Siegen photographer Otto Arnold (1881-1944) in the early 1930s open up a landscape panorama that is as historical as it is speculative. In this landscape, the plants are the protagonists of a harsh and sensitive environment. In the evening hours the photographic contributions are complemented by video projections by artist Aleksander Komarov, who turns his attention to the ruderal plants of fallow land in the war-torn city.

    As the title of the project suggests, the artist develops new visual languages and forms of translation in her engagement with these specific places, which demand a different physical experience. Hey Monte Schlacko, Dear Slagorg wants to be climbed over the steep pedestrian zone and circumnavigated several times. Kriemann creates an openness in thinking and speaking, to offer ambiguities instead of certain answers. The term Slagorg, which is made up of the words “Slag = slag” and “org = organism”, symbolizes the blurring of such a boundary that cannot be clearly defined and the interplay between botanical organisms and anthropocene interventions by humans. Specifically, Kriemann asks about the future transformation and significance of plants in a living world that has been changed by humans. What does it mean for a plant to grow on a slag heap? How does this influence our understanding of nature and human?

    Szenography: Leia Walz
    Co-Production: Lena Fließbach

  • 11.10.2024 - 09.02.2025
    L’AGE ATOMIQUE – THE ATOMIC AGE

    Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, FRA
    October 11, 2024 – February 9, 2025

    The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris invites visitors to revisit the history of modernity in the 20th century through the imaginary world of the atom. The exhibition invites us to explore the artistic representations sparked by the scientific discovery of the atom and its applications, in particular the nuclear bomb, whose devastating consequences changed the fate of humanity. Bringing together nearly 250 works (paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and installations), as well as documentation that has often been previously unpublished, the exhibition shows, for the first time in a French institution, the very different positions taken by artists in the face of scientific advances and the controversies they provoked. Dealing with a subject that is more topical than ever, the exhibition is in keeping with the museum’s desire to reflect contemporary cultural and social concerns in its programming.

    Curated by :
    Julia Garimorth, Chief Curator, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris
    Maria Stavrinaki, Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Lausanne

    Scientific advisor :
    Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Professor of Art History and Environmental Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

    Assisted by :
    Sylvie Moreau-Soteras, Research and Documentation Officer, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris

  • 17.09.2024 - 22.02.2025
    INVISIBILITY: POWERS & PERILS

    OXY ARTS, Los Angeles

    This exhibition is curated by Yael Lipschutz and presented in collaboration with Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

    The condition of invisibility—and its counterpart, hypervisibility—has long played an important role in science, literature and the arts. More recently it has become the locus of some of the most pressing struggles of our time. Vulnerable populations around the world have long borne the effects of both invisibility and hypervisibility—increasingly so in the digital age of drone warfare, facial recognition and surveillance. The politics of the invisible also permeates the planet’s ongoing environmental destruction by human beings. Even if we have begun finally to acknowledge the reality and consequences of climate change, the complex invisibility of its causes and its incremental, often hard to see impacts–species extinction, sea rise, desertification—remain a constant challenge.

    Invisibility demands that we both recognize and attempt to think beyond our current conceptual limits. It is what science encounters when it confronts phenomena such as black holes. Ninety-nine percent of the universe, namely dark matter and dark energy, is invisible to us. Indeed the world is shining with things we cannot see. Once grasped as a challenge to an all-too human-centered worldview, invisibility can teach us to discover a multiplicity of exquisite visibilities–such as those of bumblebees, mycelium, and birds– that reveal the myriad blind spots of the human sensorium.

    This exhibition highlights the work of artists and scientists striving to render visible the people, histories and planetary conditions that have been erased within the cultural mainstream, helping to make legible the limits of our own conception of the invisible and its ecological and humanitarian ramifications.

    Participating Artists: Adam Harvey, Nene Humphrey, Susanne Kriemann, Cécile Lapoire, Juergen Mayer H., Richard Mosse, Operator (Ania Catherine & Dejha Ti), Katie Paterson, Sondra Perry, Afroditi Psarra, Sarah Rosalena, Ix Shells, Tavares Strachan.

  • 24.09.2024 - 07.10.2024
    DANIAH ALSALEH, SUSANNE KRIEMANN

    Ahlam Gallery, Riyadh, KSA

    In cooperation with Goethe Institut Saudi-Arabien
    and DAI German Archaeological Institute Berlin

    Datadust skin of sand (2024) explores the convergence of ancient data and contemporary consumer waste found in archeological research sites of AlUla and Tayma in the northern Arabian desert. The coexistence of high levels of microplastics alongside archaeological contexts forms the starting point of the work cycle. Kriemann collected and photographed contemporary discarded objects on site. Printed with date syrup and make-up, which is full of microplastics, and then coated with sand, the images have a compelling tactile quality and seem to be of indeterminate age—as artifacts of recent human presence. Every grain of sand stores information in crystals that can be millions of years old; granules of contemporary plastics will be markers of human activity for hundreds of years to come. The work Datadust skin of sand (cycle I) situates itself within the hyper-sites of data and the desert, and questions our relationship to the seemingly unending stream of plastics production and its afterlives.

Archived updates

  • 13.10.2023 - 12.02.2024
    Greenery – plants in contemporary photography

    curated by Katja Reich

    Berlinische Galerie Berlin
    berlinischegalerie.de

    Lofty firs, dense mangroves, bizarre pistils – the shapes created by the plant world are prodigious. Embedded within their own complex, highly sensitive ecosystems, plants intertwine with human culture in many different ways. Contemplating them can soothe the nerves, give food for thought and trigger powerful emotions such as fear or anxiety.

    The exhibition “Greenery: Plants in contemporary photography” responds to this multi-faceted theme. These contemporary works mostly from our Photography Collection address the often contradictory relationship between humans and plants through the medium of photography. The six photographers and artists do not focus here on vegetation in its wild and untamed state, but on how it has been overlaid by human activity: carefully stacked deadwood in Germany’s Black Forest, mangrove swamps contaminated by plastic in Indonesia, botanical cultures in the tropics. These depictions dig down to the cultural inventions underlying apparently archetypal notions. They open up avenues to revisit the shifting relationships between humans and plants.

    Artists: Falk Haberkorn, Ingar Krauss, Susanne Kriemann, Mimi Cherono Ng‘ok, Stefanie Seufert, Auriga/Folkwang-Archiv featured by Andrzej Steinbach.

  • 03.05.2023 - 23.02.2024
    The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project

    curated by Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani

    CCA Montreal
    cca.qc.ca

    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. Curated by Bas Princen and Stefano Graziani, The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project is structured as an exhibition, an oral history conducted in cinematographic form, a series of commissioned artists’ books, and a web issue. The project aims to dissect the practice of artists and photographers whose work has crucially contributed to defining thresholds of transformation of the discipline within the last fifty years in relation to specific topics—from the notion of landscape to the complexity of the archive as a project format, among others.

    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.

  • 03.06.2023 - 31.07.2023
    Cruel Radiance

    curated by Karo Marko and Harry Palviranta

    Backlight Festival

    backlight.fi

    What kind of evidentiary power can we associate with images in a world where man-made crises and conflicts have long since exceeded human proportions? How does matter, our material and elementary surroundings, record evidence of violence? What kind of roles do such non-human visual actors have in bearing witness to our pernicious actions?

    Cruel Radiance, the 2023 edition of the Backlight festival, examines the evidential aspects of matter through photography and the moving image. From the omnipresence of particle pollution to the lasting legacies of nuclear weapons, from sub-zero temperatures to the residues of the mining industry, the exhibition sheds light on a whole variety of material elements as visual actors with singular testimonial capacities. In so doing, the stage is set for diverse visual dimensions and temporalities of violence ranging from slow cumulative processes to more abrupt conflicts. True to its title, Cruel Radiance invites the viewer to engage with a material repository of our ways of being together.

     

    Artists: Fiona Amundsen and Kanariya Eishi, Solmaz Daryani, Veli Granö, HNV Collective: Felicia Honkasalo, Akuliina Niemi, Sinna Virtanen, Susanne Kriemann, Noelle Mason, Ali Akbar Mehta, Anastasia Mityukova, Susan Schuppli, Anaïs Tondeur, Toshio Fukada, Eiichi Matsumoto.

  • 09.03.2023 - 29.05.2023
    MINING PHOTOGRAPHY. THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF IMAGE PRODUCTION

    curated by Esther Ruelfs and Boaz Levin

    Kunst Haus Wien

    kunsthauswien.com

    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

  • 15.07.2022 - 31.10.2022
    MINING PHOTOGRAPHY. THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF IMAGE PRODUCTION

    curated by Esther Ruelfs and Boaz Levin

    Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

    https://www.mkg-hamburg.de

    “Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production” is dedicated to the material history of key resources used for image production, adressing the social and political context of their extraction and waste and its relation to climate change. Using historical photo¬graphs and contemporary artistic positions as well as interviews with restorers, geologists, and climate researchers, the exhibition tells the story of photography as one of industrial production, showing the extent to which the medium has been deeply intertwined with human change of the environment.

    With Ignacio Acosta, Lisa Barnard, F& D Cartier, Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio (Lauren Bon, Tristan Duke, Richard Nielsen), Klasse Digitale Grafik HFBK (Mari Lebanidze, Cleo Miao, Leon Schwer und Marco Wesche), Susanne Kriemann, Mary Mattingly, Daphné Nan Le Sergent, Lisa Rave, Alison Rossiter, Robert Smithson, Simon Starling, Anaïs Tondeur, James Welling, Noa Yafe, Tobias Zielony

    In cooperation with Kunsthaus Wien, Gewerbemuseum Winterthur and the HFBK Hamburg.

     

  • 10.06.2022 - 14.08.2022
    Takeover

    curated by the children of 48. Grundschule, Pankow , Carl-Humann-Grundschule, Prenzlauer Berg , Heinrich-von-Stephan-Gemeinschaftsschule, Moabit

    guided by Julia Moritz and Jennifer Streter

    Gropius Bau Berlin

    https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de

    Takeover invites children to take on the role of curators. Featuring works by international artists, the exhibition curated and realised by Berlin primary school students is now on view on the ground floor of the Gropius Bau.

    With Vanessa Farfán, Jan Peter Hammer, Khansa Humeidan, Susanne Kriemann, Michelle-Marie Letelier, Lisa Rave, Egill Sæbjörnsson. The first iteration took place in 2021 with Roberta Busechian and Tue Greenfort, .

     

  • 10.09.2021 - 24.04.2022
    Mind Bombs. Visual Cultures of Political Violence

    Curated by Dr. Sebastian Baden

    Kunsthalle Mannheim

    https://www.kuma.art

    RAF, NSU and IS are names of terrorist groups whose extremist propaganda and political violence challenge the visual arts to react decisively. The exhibition “MINDBOMBS” at the Kunsthalle Mannheim opens up a highly topical artistic perspective on the history and political iconography of modern terrorism. For the first time, the effects of social revolutionary, right-wing extremist and jihadist terrorism on visual culture will be examined together in three sections. 20 years after September 11, 2001 and 10 years after the discovery of the NSU in Germany, the exhibition is dedicated to the fighting term of terrorism and its changes in history from the French Revolution to the present.

    Artists:  Hiba Al Ansari, Khalid Albaih, Morehshin Allahyari, Francis Alÿs, Kader Attia, Walter Dahn & Jiří Dokoupi, Jacques-Louis David, Christoph Draeger, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Forensic Architecture, Chloé Galibert-Lâiné & Kevin B. Lee, Gregory Green, Johan Grimonprez, Richard Hamilton, Omar Imam, Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, Christof Kohlhöfer, Susanne Kriemann, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Almut Linde, Georg Lutz, Édouard Manet, Paula Markert, Olaf Metzel, Henrike Naumann, Wolf Pehlke, Ariel Reichman, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Ivana Spinelli, Klaus Staeck, J.M. Voltz

    Intervention „Brick by Brick“: Francesca Audretsch, Vanessa Bosch, Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun, Charlotte Eifler & Clarissa Thieme, Anna Knöller, Isabelle Konrad, Judith Milz, Nis Petersen, Johanna Schäfer, Natalia Schmidt, Karolina Sobel, Janis Zeckai.

  • 13.09.2020 - 31.12.2022
    In the SS-Auxiliary – The Female Guards of the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp

    co-conceived by Dominique Hurth

    www.ravensbrueck-sbg.de

    Permanent artistic intervention at the Mahn‑ und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück

    The exhibition focuses on the following themes: the women’s background; the power and violence relationships that prevailed at the camp; the career opportunities of female guards; and the site of Ravensbrück as a principal training and recruitment center for female guards. In addition, it addresses the victims’ attempts of seeking justice as well as the “silence that speaks volumes” on the part of their perpetrators. Last but not least, the fascinating appeal of the figure of the ‘SS female guard’ in popular culture is also put up for discussion.

    Under the title “Pictures, Voices, and Clichés”, five artists have developed interventions in cooperation with the exhibition project. They approach the topic of the SS female guard from a perspective relevant to the present day. The traces of violence in architectural relics and landscapes, the dichotomy of home and crime scene, the role of music within the context of forced labour, the ‘brutal cosiness’ of the interiors of the guards’ accommodation, the educational methods within the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (‘people’s community’) – these are all focal points of the artistic strategies.

    The artistic contributions of Marianna Christofides, Arnold Dreyblatt, Moritz Fehr, Dominique Hurth and Susanne Kriemann are embedded within the historical exhibition.

     

     

  • 01.12.2021 - 18.03.2022
    BEUYS OPEN SOURCE

    Belmacz

    45 Davies Street, London

    Not an exhibition in homage, Beuys Open Source treats the legacy of Joseph Beuys as something of a publicly accessible data set. Working with this twenty-first century metaphor involves seeing the Artist not as a political figure but as someone with far more social sway in our contemporary age: the startup CEO. That is, the founder of something innovative; the boss with skittish determination; the convener of bodies, who together can defy normalcy to materialise fantasy. Here, we are reminded that epistemologically both mysticism and symbolism – two words steeped in Beuysian associations – have common roots in that which is collectively agreed, believed, and followed.

    Artists: Carla Åhlander, Mikael D. Brkic, Dan Coopey, Rafael Pérez Evans, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, Johanna M. Guggenberger, Steph Huang, Daniel Huss, Susanne Kriemann, Elisabeth Molin, Joel Tomlin and Abbas Zahedi.

    http://belmacz.com