Archived updates

• 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

• 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.