PHOTO: © Susanne Kriemann, aus / from: Hey Monte Schlacko, dear Slagorg, seit / since 2024, Copyright: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2025

Susanne Kriemann: Knochen, Pech, Natternkopf (Being a Photograph)

In the organizer's words:

What is a photograph and what stories do the elements that make up a photographic image tell? Susanne Kriemann pursues these questions. Her field research takes her to the former uranium mining areas in the Ore Mountains and the Massif Central in southern France or to a steelworks in Siegerland. The exhibition invites visitors to follow the artist's explorations and to perceive plants, minerals and metals as actors in image production. It begins with photographs of Monte Schlacko in Siegen, a slag heap that was created in the course of steel production. Rare plants have colonized the soil containing heavy metals. They are witnesses to industrial production and at the same time embody it by feeding on its waste products. The pictures and textile works created in Saxony, Thuringia and Limousin deal with the afterlife of radioactive radiation. In X-ray images and autoradiographs of plants living there, Susanne Kriemann makes the traces of the uranium that was once mined visible. She traces connections between materials, energy and forms of existence that go beyond human existence. The pitchblende, from which uranium is extracted, plays a special role here: its radiation is able to create a photographic image without light. The darkness in the interior exhibition space is reminiscent of working underground. Here, mining tools appear as fleeting projections.

The exhibition is a cooperation with Camera Austria. It was on display in Graz from March 8 to May 18, 2025 under the title Susanne Kriemann: Ray, Rock, Rowan (Being a Photograph) and was expanded for the presentation in Leipzig. The Graz exhibition was curated by Margit Neuhold.

A reader accompanying the exhibition has been published by Edition Camera Austria. It was designed by James Langdon and brings together texts by Siobhan Angus, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Zippora Elders, Daisy Hildyard, Bhanu Kapil, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Lisa Rosendahl and an introduction by Margit Neuhold and Christina Töpfer. The reader is available at the GfZK.

This content has been machine translated.

Price information:

Free admission on Wednesdays

Location

Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig Karl-Tauchnitz-Str. 9-11 04107 Leipzig

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