Susanne Kriemann, 2014
Photo courtesy Susanne Kriemann
The Site Residency
Berlin-based artist Susanne Kriemann is the second participant of the TSR program invited to Gotland during February. Following her stay she will work closely with poet Maria Barnas as her ghostwriter.
Currently Susanne Kriemann is an advising researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, the Netherlands, where she is continuing her exploration of the power of archives. She incorporates her own photographs with those she has extracted from the vaults of the past, creating works that are not only visually associative but also contextually related, so that a many-layered narrative begins to appear when viewing her projects. Her complex series of photographs are often also published as artist books, with ‘One Day’ published in 2010 by Witte de With, Rotterdam, ‘Ashes and broken brickwork of a logical theory’ in 2010 by ROMA, Amsterdam, ‘One Time One Million’ in 2009 by ROMA, Amsterdam, and ‘12 650’ in 2008 by A Prior, Ghent.
Additionally, she has brought out works that appear exclusively in print form, such as ‘The Future – Ramses Files’ published in 2006 as a newspaper, her 2012 project ‘Het Licht/The Light’ also in newspaper format, and ‘Reading Susanne Kriemann’, a textbook comprised of essays on her work and how it relates to the acts of reading and perceiving. These artist books are testaments to her overarching concern with historiography—how history is written, read, and rewritten—and the connections that can be found between art, literature, and archaeology. Currently she is working on a new artist book, which bears the Latin palindrome as title, ‘in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni’ to be published in spring 2014.
Susanne Kriemann, born 1972 in Erlangen, Germany, is an artist working and living in Berlin. In 2010, she was awarded the GASAG Art Prize and a solo exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, where she presented material from her extensive series ‘Ashes and broken brickwork of a logical theory’, which has also appeared at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2009), Kiosk Gent (2010), RaebervonStenglin Zürich (2010) and CAG Vancouver (2010). Her work ‘A silent crazy jungle under glass’ was shown in 2011 at Kunsthalle Winterthur in Winterthur Switzerland and at Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2012. Her 2008 work ‘12 650 000’ was included in the 5th Berlin Biennale in the Neue Nationalgalerie. Susanne Kriemann’s shows for 2013 include ‘Modelling (Construction School)’, at Arnolfini in Bristol, ‘Tea with Nefertiti’ at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris and later Institute of Contemporary Art Valencia and ‘The Way of the Shovel’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Maria Barnas (NL, 1973) lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Both in her written work, including novels, poetry and essays and in her visual work, she focuses on how description shapes reality, with a special interest in what Stephan Themerson called 'The urge to create visions'. She studied at the Rietveld Academy and and was resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and The American Academy in Rome. Barnas is currently advisor at the Rijksakademie. Barnas was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for her first collection of poetry Twee Zonnen (2003) and has since published highly appraised collections, including Er staat een stad op in 2007. In 2011 her collected observations on art and literature for NRC Handelsblad were published in Fantastisch. Her latest collection of poems Jaja de oerknal (Yeah-yeah the Big Bang) came out in 2013, a book focusing on mechanisms of fear, is nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize 2014. Barnas is currently doing research into visual and spatial essays, in which language and image are combined. The first in this series, On News Desks and Getting Lost, was presented at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, during the lecture series Facing Forward. A new spatial essay will be presented at CBK Drenthe, on The International Cosmonaut, in the spring of 2014.