HAMBURG.- Susanne Kriemann (b. 1972) deals in her art with radioactive radiation and the effects of civilisation on nature. In the exhibition Reconsidering Photography: Underbrush, the artist places two of her work complexes in dialogue with historical photographs and prints from the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Kriemann uses not only photography in her work but also draws on historical printing methods such as photogravure, for example when she tries to capture the radioactivity of contaminated plants in Gessenwiese, Kanigsberg (2017–2020). She extracts the pigment for this process from the affected plants themselves, thus making radioactivity a physical component of her images. An installation of plant samples in the show gives an insight into the development of her photogravures. For the second work series on view, Mngrv (2018–2020), which she produced especially for the show, Kriemann was inspired by the so-called nature-printed engravings made by botanists Constantin von Ettingshausen (1826–1897) and Alois Pokorny (1826–1886). She makes prints based on photographs of mangrove plants, into which she also incorporates pieces and structural elements of plastic waste she collects in the mangrove forests of South and South-East Asia. In the show, Kriemann juxtaposes her two series with around forty works from the Photography and New Media Collection at MK&G, thus establishing a connection with historical printing techniques. Her intuitive selection of photogravures, pigment prints and nature-printed engravings is oriented around motifs derived from underbrush. The works on view were produced by artists including Annie W. Brigman (1869–1950), Clarence Hudson White (1871–1925), Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934), Alice Boughton (1867–1943), Oscar (1871–1937) and Theodor Hofmeister (1868–1943), and Heinrich Kühn (1866–1944).

For her work Gessenwiese, Kanigsberg (2017–2020), Kriemann began in 2017 to follow the research undertaken by biologists and geologists from the University of Jena into the renaturation of the former uranium ore mines operated by the SDAG Wismut (Soviet-German Wismut mining company) in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains). Highly radioactive uranium ore was mined there from 1949 to 1990 – a period when East Germany was the fourth biggest uranium producer in the world. Today the soil is heavily contaminated with heavy metals, so there’s no need to look to Fukushima to experience the insidious long-term effects of radioactivity on the landscape. Kriemann has chosen to use photography for her artistic research – a medium that has traditionally been associated with making an exact record of the physical world. And yet her attempts to capture contaminated plants on film push the medium to the limits of what can be depicted, for radiation, although scientifically measurable, remains invisible to the eye – and to the camera lens. In order to nonetheless inscribe it into the image, Kriemann harvests plants she has photographed and processes them into variously coloured pigments to use for printing her photogravures. Taking recourse to this outmoded photomechanical fine-art printing process from the nineteenth century offers the artist a way to turn the plants into material she can use as a direct component of her works.




In Mngrv (2020), which deals with mangrove forests in Trincomalee (Sri Lanka), Pulau Ubin (Singapore) and Panduang-Bintan (Indonesia), Kriemann draws on the technique of nature-printed engraving pioneered by the botanists Constantin von Ettingshausen and Alois Pokorny in the nineteenth century. In their extensive natural history portfolio on the vegetation of Austria (1856), they used a special printing process that was able to show the veins and skeletons of the leaves of dried plants in relief and in colour. The results are fascinating with their impressive precision and unique haptic quality. “An impression that is identical to the original,” remarked the botanical illustrator and printer Alois Auer in 1853. Here, too, Kriemann has taken inspiration from a technique that, like photography, was placed at the service of science in the nineteenth century. Devoting her artistic research to the way mangrove forests have become increasingly mired in and entangled with discarded consumer items made of plastic, she harks back to her predecessors’ efforts to document changes in nature. She bases her works on photographic templates – such as botanical illustrations from historical encyclopaedias – as well as her own recent photos of mangrove forests. She then overprints these photos with plastic items such as drinking straws, nets or pool slippers, applying them using pigments that she extracts from oil residues found in the mangrove forests. In this way, she inscribes the remnants of civilisation not only as a structuring element in her photographs but also as actual material.

Susanne Kriemann has been professor of artistic photography at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design since 2017. Her work is research-based and deals with the technical prerequisites and historical conditions for making photographs. Her works have been exhibited at venues including the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2018); the Schering Stiftung Berlin (2016); Belvedere 21, Vienna (2013); and the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2012).

With its exhibition series Reconsidering Photography, launched in 2017, MK&G has been inviting artists, photographers and scientists to peruse the Photography and New Media Collection at MK&G and relate it to their own works or projects. The artists invited thus far include Hans Hansen, Jochen Lempert & Peter Piller, Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Reinhard Matz, Steffen Siegel and Bernd Stiegler.