Join us for a talk by artist Susanne Kriemann, who will present her research and photographic projects dealing with radioactivity.

Kriemann’s practice is informed by an expansive notion of the photographic document, which understands the environment like a photographic device that records the impacts of human activity. Her interest in the long-term effects of human interventions in the environment has led her to devote several of her projects to the theme of radioactivity.

As part of her contribution to the book 10%: Concerning the Image Archive of a Nuclear Research Centre, she recontextualized images from the archive of the Karslruhe Nuclear Research Centre by presenting them alongside photographs documenting the impact of radiation on the surrounding forests. In P(ech) B(lende) and Ge(ssenwiese), K(anigsberg), she documented the contamination of German landscapes by the mining of radioactive minerals and their ongoing rehabilitation, combining archival images, autoradiographs, and heliogravures produced using pigments extracted from contaminated plants.

Taking these works as a starting point, Kriemann will present her photographic practice and the methodologies she has developed throughout her projects.

This talk is part of a series of events building on the studio visits organized for the exhibition The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project. It offers an opportunity to meet artists and photographers and continue to reflect on their processes and the strategies they use in constructing visual arguments, critiques, research, and observations about our built environment.

Susanne Kriemann lives and works in Berlin. She is a professor of Artistic Photography at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe and the co-founder of the artist initiative ABA AiR Berlin Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Kriemann investigates the medium of photography in the context of social history and archival practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Wattis San Francisco, Kunsthalle Wien, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Arnolfini Bristol, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, and Salonul de projecte Bucarest. She has participated in the 11th Shanghai Biennial, the 10th Gothenburg Biennial, the 5th Moscow Biennia,l and 5th Berlin Biennial. She has also participated in various artist residency programs, including at the NTU CCA Singapore (2019) and at the Goethe Institute in Colombo. She has co-published seventeen artist’s books since 1998.