Susanne Kriemann
Berlin artist Susanne Kriemann (b. 1972, Germany) tracks remnants of the industrial era and the atomic age into our immediate environment. Her extensive engagement with radioactivity was initially motivated by the Chernobyl disaster of forty years ago, which remains a recurring motif in her artistic research. Now, this exhibition is centered around the landscapes of former uranium extraction sites in Saxony, Thuringia, and the Limousin region in France. These are places where radiation is not just a distant or abstract phenomenon, but rather present in the soil, flora, and architecture. This exhibition brings together her research and the materials revealed to the artist when her Berlin studio was renovated. Kriemann thus makes use of an expanded understanding of photography, incorporating material and process in equal measure.
Kriemann’s sustained artistic inquiry, Pechblende (Pitchblende), has long incorporated a process creating images without a camera or an external light source known as autoradiography, where radioactive substances directly expose photographic film. The artist’s new cycle, Pechblende (Fever), incorporates both samples of uranium-bearing ore and dried plant specimens collected from former uranium mining sites that have since been environmentally remediated. Another series of works saw her burying unexposed sheet film in a reclaimed mine waste heap near Dresden. There too, the film records an energy that is neither immediately visible nor confined to the past, but continues to exert a material presence in the landscape.
Kriemann has also drawn on her art studio for this exhibition, which is at once the place she works and a witness to the building’s industrial past. The artist discovered slag beneath her old wooden floorboards, an industrial byproduct often used as construction fill. She then transformed this slag into pigment, and used the wood shavings to create her own paper. These floorboards will now become a part of a site-specific scenography in direct conversation with the Amerika Haus. It is a cyclical logic typical of Kriemann’s work: every action yields a byproduct whose effects persist elsewhere.
All these layers are brought together in the exhibition title (In the Sun’s Fever Flutter Butterflies in the Stomach). “Fever” evokes our overheated current moment of climate change, depleted resources, and surplus production, as well as the ways in which exploitative past acts of industry continue to affect landscapes, materials, and ecological systems even today. By contrast, the “butterflies in the stomach” describes the excitement one feels even before determining its cause—unlike radiation, which remains imperceptible as it takes effect. Kriemann asks how such hidden impacts can be made palpable, and what forms of knowledge emerge from attending to the legacies of past industries.
The work will be presented for the first time at C/O Berlin as part of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 26, in a joint exhibition with Stelios Kallinikou . Cliffs Among Dreams. Curated by Katharina Täschner. A corresponding publication will be released by Hartmann Books for each exhibition.
Susanne Kriemann (b. 1972, Germany) is an artist and professor at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. She has headed ABA AiR Berlin Alexanderplatz with Aleksander Komarov since 2010. Her works have been shown internationally at GfzK, Leipzig; Camera Austria, Graz; Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; C/O Berlin; and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. In addition, they have been shown at the 2nd Diriyah Biennale in Riyadh, the 11th Shanghai Biennale, the 10th and 11th Göteborg International Biennial, the 2nd Karachi Biennale, the 5th Moscow Biennale, and the 5th Berlin Biennale. She has published eighteen artist books since 1998.
The After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize is a joint project of the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Crespo Foundation. Every year, the prize enables the realization of two research-intensive projects and honors artists or groups with advanced exhibition and publication practices who explore new concepts of nature in photography and visual media through their work. The prize carries a cash award of 40,000 euros for each winner as well as an exhibition at C/O Berlin with an accompanying publication. After its first stop at C/O Berlin, the double exhibition will be on view from Feb 26 to May 23, 2027, at the Open Space of the Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt am Main.
