Press information
Susanne Kriemann
Ray, Rock, Rowan
(Being a Photograph)
Infos
Press preview
7.3.2025, 11 a.m.
Opening
7.3.2025, 6 p.m.
Duration
8.3. – 18.5.2025
Opening hours
Tue – Sun and bank holidays
10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
With a video work by
Aleksander Komarov
Scenography
Leia Walz
Curated by
Margit Neuhold

Press Information
“How can we repurpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of Progress to make visible the other worlds it has ignored and damaged? Living in a time of planetary catastrophe thus begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the worlds around us.”¹ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote these lines which echo in the artistic practice of Susanne Kriemann—in the collective form. Kriemann’s artistic work begins in places where the global repercussions of extraction and human action on our planet become manifest: Using various methods—in which the photographic image is central—she traces the geological and vegetable material of exploited and traumatized landscapes so as to interrogate more-than-human worlds and to destabilize the anthropocentric gaze. With a content-related emphasis on (nuclear) extraction and its impacts, Susanne Kriemann’s exhibition brings together photographic works, archival material, literature, and found objects in an environment developed specifically for Camera Austria, and provides insights into her extensive and complex artistic process of the past ten years.
The landmarked architecture of the Eiserne Haus (Iron House), a cast-iron skeleton construction from 1848, forms the exhibition’s resonance chamber in the scenography developed by Leia Walz. The spatial staging of Hey Monte Schlacko, dear Slagorg (since 2024)² combines a video installation by Aleksander Komarov with various textiles and prints showing overlays of rock and sparse vegetation. The work takes its starting point in the slag heap that was created on the Haardt mountain range on the edge of the city of Siegen in North Rhine-Westphalia between 1900 and 1930. Since the decommissioning of the Bremer Hütte (Bremen steelworks) roughly one hundred years ago, barely anything other than vegetation typical of waste dumps has taken root in the soil contaminated with heavy metals. But having been designated as a nature reserve, it has nevertheless become a refuge for endangered species: The North Rhine-Westphalia State Agency for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection lists around sixty different plant species, including bracken and rowan.³
Hey Monte Schlacko, dear Slagorg stands at the beginning of the environment in the Camera Austria exhibition, whereby the handling of more-than-human worlds with the effects of the Anthropocene comes into view: Photos of the slag-heap geography; its vegetation and various bodies of rock previously coiled around the Galeria Karstadt department store building in the center of the city of Siegen, which has been vacant for roughly one and a half years—a ruin of overheated consumer society. Though still outfitted with a department store interior and escalators, the façade with its overlays and stratifications thus mutated into a slag-heap organism with talus vegetation. Marcia Bjornerud writes that geologists perceive rocks and landscape as a palimpsest: “In the same way, everywhere on Earth, traces of earlier epochs persist in the contours of landforms and the rocks beneath, even as new chapters are being written.”4 They work with the material of deep time and simultaneously lay the foundations for the future.
In Hey Monte Schlacko, dear Slagorg, geography and material are inscribed in the work and simultaneously developed further. The material, which originally covered the Galeria Karstadt building, has undergone processes of being redesigned, expanded, and renewed: Prints of a viper’s bugloss that has taken root in barren, mossy ground, a pink-blooming water hemp, or a singular hawkweed, which has already formed seeds again, were previously attached to a shop window and have now been framed for Camera Austria, or else prints made especially for Camera Austria have found existing frames in Graz. Material has been layered and shifted. These pictures were and are interwoven with an archive in Siegen from the time when the mining of ore came to an end. A long band with Otto Arnold’s black-and-white photos of rare plants was laminated on the façade. The installation enters in dialogue not only temporally, but also geographically: Aleksander Komarov’s video installation about the ruderal vegetation of a traumatized landscape of the Ukrainian battle zone in Kharkiv here repeatedly foregrounds ecological destruction. Plants react to their surroundings, display behaviors, and enter into exchange. So, what might it mean to regard plants not only as objects of knowledge, but also as bearers of knowledge, and thus comprehend them as participants in creative processes and no longer merely as raw material to be exploited?
Susanne Kriemann regards the world as an “analogue recording system” for processes initiated by humans, which precipitate gradual changes in the ecosystems and become inscribed in different geographies. Central to this is an examination of the extraction of raw materials, the handling of the landscapes left behind, and something that Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”5 Narratives about the slow accumulation of toxic substances in the air and ground or the escalating extinction of species as a result of destroyed habitats stand in contrast to the violence that delivers surprising or suddenly occurring and spectacular pictures. How can these ever-advancing environmental catastrophes be depicted, or how can we picture those conditions that are progressively worsening our living conditions? How can attention be steered to formless and invisible threats that, while less spectacular, have long-term and tangible effects?
The scenography of the main room includes Susanne Kriemann’s intensive, yearslong occupation with radioactivity. Since 2015, in different cycles of the extensive group of works Pechblende (Pitchblende), she has been working on making it possible for the human eye to experience invisible radioactive radiation. In 1789, Martin Heinrich Klaproth succeeded in isolating uranium from this radioactive material, which is also called uraninite. In the Klaproth cycle (since 2024), Kriemann works, among other things, with the camera-less technique of the autoradiogram: In it, radioactive nuclides from pitchblende “expose” the negative. Over the course of the seven-day-long exposure time, a schematic form—which defies description, but evokes many associations—is contrasted by the rock on the deep-black ground of the paper: possibly the face of an invisible being, a moon face, or creatures of the deep sea, and perhaps also spirits from another geological era, of which Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing collectively writes: “Whereas Progress trained us to keep moving forward, to look up to an apex at the end of a horizon, ghosts show us multiple unruly temporalities.”6 While contemplating the politics of visibility inscribed in time, Kriemann expanded this cycle for Camera Austria: Here, she shows dried gorse (from the former French uranium mining area near Limoges) exposed by means of pitchblende in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, which brought forth lines that look like veins.
The discovery of radioactivity is linked to photographic processes: Henri Becquerel recognized this in 1896, when the uranium salts he had placed on a photo plate left behind an imprint, despite having been stored in a dark place. Even more momentous, however, was an accident in a drawer, in which a uranium-sulfur compound made a copper cross visible in cracks on a glass plate after being developed by chance.7 It would nevertheless still take until 1938 for the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann to discover radioactive radiation.
Pitchblende was mined on a large scale in Saxony and Thuringia after the Second World War and contributed substantially to the nuclear armament and nuclear weapon program of the USSR. Wismut AG (later SDAG Wismut) made the Ore Mountains into the fourth-largest site for uranium mining in the world and produced 230,400 tons of uranium in the years between 1947 and 1990.8 What has been left behind is a polluted and radiation-contaminated site: the groundwater and soil and the radon emanating from the slag heaps, which is dispersed by the wind. The environmental damage is immense: After decades of technically complex renaturation projects, the former uranium mines must also continue to be monitored and tasks performed for eternity; the water pumps, which run ceaselessly in order to safeguard the water quality for future generations are completely left out of the narrative around atomic energy.
Since 2016, Susanne Kriemann has worked with a team of researchers at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena who were examining the highly contaminated soils of the Wismut uranium mining sites. Wilde Möhre, Falsche Kamille, Bitterkraut (Wild Carrot, False Chamomile, Ox Tongue, since 2016) are among the plants that, along with mycorrhizae, perform regeneration processes most successfully by absorbing harmful substances from the soil and storing them: In the specimens harvested, it was possible to verify the existence of cesium-137 (half-life of thirty years) and uranium-235 (half-life of 703.8 million years), but also aluminum, lead, gadolinium, germanium, copper, nickel, lanthanum, quicksilver, zinc, and others. Susanne Kriemann produced the pigment for her heliogravures from dust particles obtained from the abovementioned plants; the toxic elements are thus inscribed in the work, whose reserved colors slowly fade in sunlight.
Susanne Kriemann is familiar with various geographies of uranium mining, its contaminated landscapes (in Germany, France, Canada, the United States, and Ukraine), and its infrastructures (numerous museums, research institutions, and archives). Last year, she began realizing the group of works Lupin, fougère, genêt (Lupine, Fern, Gorse, since 2024), which takes the area around Limoges, where uranium was first mined in France and was extracted intensively between 1948 and 2001, as its starting point. After the mines closed, they were flooded with water. The artificial lakes that were created transformed the landscape, which now in addition to a storage site for uranium waste, is also home to an interactive museum extolling the benefits of nuclear technology. The contamination is metabolized by the vegetation alongside the water in particular, as shown by the lupine, fern, and gorse plants growing there. In her large-format collages, Susanne Kriemann compacts photos of this more-than-human world; she also produced photograms of the plants that lend their names to this group of works, which she exposed with a smartphone, or radiographs that make their “skeletons” visible.
The bands of raw silk dyed with contaminated plant-based materials and soil (Canopy, canopy, since 2018) that structure the main room of the exhibition and are simultaneously parts of the extensive cycle Library for radioactive afterlife (since 2015) also steer attention to Susanne Kriemann’s exploratory way of working and her huge library: publications with different narratives on radioactivity, the manifestations of an anthropocentrically oriented modernity, whose disastrous repercussions extend over different spans of time, and their relative invisibility resulting from the creeping, destructive violence of the environmental catastrophe. Most recently, these effects became visible again with the start of the Russian war of aggression, which raised awareness of the areas around Reactor Block 4 of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant in Chornobyl, which was damaged in 1986: The invasion of Russian troops and the stationing of them in the Red Forest, which is among the most radiation-contaminated places in the world, whirled up radioactive dust particles, which have since then been dispersed and carried ever further, transcending all borders.
The term “Being a Photograph” as it is mentioned in the exhibition title responds to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s understanding of language in the publication Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).
Margit Neuhold
¹ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan et al., “Introduction,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M7.
² In the framework of the “Artist in Residence Siegen” program of the University of Siegen and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Susanne Kriemann presented Hey Monte Schlacko, Dear Slagorg from October 23–December 31, 2024.
³ See the Eifel National Park and nature reserve in North Rhine-Westphalia; Schlackenhalde Monte Schlacko Nature Reserve (SI-105), habitats and species, https://nsg.naturschutzinformationen.nrw.de/nsg/de/fachinfo/gebiete/gesamt/SI-105 [accessed in January 2025].
4 Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 22.
5 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 2.
6 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, G7.
7 See Siobhan Angus, Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), pp. 111–13.
8 See Susanne Kriemann and Eva Wilson, Supplement: Exclusion Zones, ed. Jeff Khonsary (Vancouver: Fillip, 2017), p. 23.
Susanne Kriemann is an artist and a professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (DE). Since 2010 she co-organizes ABA – AiR Berlin Alexanderplatz (DE) together with Aleksander Komarov. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including The Wattis Institute, San Francisco (US); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (AT); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL); C/O Berlin, and MK&G Hamburg (DE); at the 2nd Diriyah Biennial Riyadh (SA), the 11th Shanghai Biennial (CN), the 10th and 11th Gothenburg International Biennials (SE), the 2nd Karachi Biennale (PK), the 5th Moscow Biennial (RU) and the 5th Berlin Biennial. She has authored seventeen artist’s books since 1998.
The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language reader published by Edition Camera Austria, which brings together authors who offer a frame of reference for Susanne Kriemann’s work: Siobhan Angus, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Zippora Elders, Daisy Hildyard, Bhanu Kapil, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Lisa Rosendahl. Book design: James Langdon.
Images
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