Susanne Kriemann, 2015
Photo: duskdust © Susanne Krimann
BAC PIR resident for 2015-16.
Susanne Kriemann was the second artist to participate at The Site Residency program in February 2014. Later that year she was invited back to Gotland to be part of the seminar All At Once: A Working Method for Processing the Situation’s Situation organized by Canadian artist Judy Radul. She used her time for fieldtrips and continued her research on the history of the limestone industry and the current cement production on the island. In August 2015 Kriemann visited her chosen site on the Furillen peninsula, situated on the the north-east of Gotland, to make her final series of photographs for the book publication and the photographic print series duskdust.
Information must always cross a threshold before it can be communicated to consciousness. A medium is required, something to ensure that the information can reach the other side and that, once it has arrived, it can be understood the way it was intended. A camera can of course act as that medium and represent information visually, and language itself, the very words we must use to render our thoughts comprehensible, is also a means with which to cross the threshold.
The information we receive then piles upon itself like the strata of rock formations, which show their history simultaneously, the past and present merging into a giant structure.
The condition of (artistic) labor is one to which I am always seem to return to when I consider a new work. My preoccupation with uncovering or rereading previously sculpted histories, forever shuffle through and digging into archives, has fueled my fascination with archaeology and the anthropological unearthing of lost narratives. More recently, my interest in labor as not only a necessary component of creating art, but also as the amount of physical energy that humans have, throughout history, applied to nature in order to exploit its materials, has led me to seek out areas where hard physical labor and the process of revelation converge, namely, in mining.
The work duskdust (to be completed as book work in early 2016 and as a photographic work later next spring) deals with a former cement factory turned into an Eco-friendly boutique hotel. One of the remaining mountains of cement rubble becomes the protagonist of the work. The sun renders the mountain’s resolution and colors for my high resolution camera, to become digital noise in some parts. In the work, another sun emerges, which is the lava in the oven heating up the rocks in order to crash to dust and to become cement. This act of light is controlled 24/7 by the workers in the factory. The mountain reflects both suns and questions the capacity of the eye to see, erasing material, calculation sight.
The work challenges the medium in which digital photographs enter spatial dimensions. It renders the act of crashing mountain into dust into a light absorbing material.
Susanne Kriemann, September 2015
is born 1972 in Erlangen, Germany, and 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.