Susanne Kriemann

August 21 - September 25 2011

Susanne Kriemann composes her works based on historical and social research. The artist often reproduces vintage prints and combines the appropriated material with new photos taken by herself; the emerging convolution of pictures is a result of visual association and formal analogies, but at the same time it derives from topics that were linked to the original context of the pictures.
At Kunsthalle Winterthur, Kriemann will show two comprehensive photo installations. The walkable panopticon of One Time One Million (2009) presents product photographs of an original Hasselblad camera next to pictures of individual birds, flocks of birds and aerial views of housing developments. The pictures are part of a suggestive visual network, but at the same time they share a context that is based on information: Hasselblad, who invented the world famous camera, was an enthusiastic ornithologist and took hundreds of pictures of birds. With the flocks of birds the issue of migration comes up, which is again key in relation to the images of the housing development: they were built outside Stockholm in the 1970s for Swedish workers, but turned very quickly into ghettos for human migrants, meaning war and economic refugees.
In her brand new work Untitled (A Silent Crazy Jungle Under Glass) (2011) Kriemann combines historical forms of abstraction with aspects of the archive, the latter being a topic that has been crucial for her for a long time. The most interesting question here concerns references to reality: in an archive they are highly desirable, in photography they are inevitable and in abstraction they are unwanted. Setting out from visual analogies between archives and abstraction a number of other questions are stimulated: do a lot of archives not lack the relation to everyday life, to reality? And thus, do they not turn into an epitome of the perfect abstract picture?

Oliver Kielmayer