BERLIN.- C/O Berlin will present the double exhibition of the winners of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 26: Stelios Kallinikou. Cliffs Among Dreams and Susanne Kriemann . Im Fieber der Sonne flattern Schmetterlinge im Bauch from Sep 12, 2026 to Jan 20, 2027. The opening takes place on Friday, Sep 11, 2026 at 20:00 at C/O Berlin in Amerika Haus.
By recognizing the work of Stelios Kallinikou and Susanne Kriemann, C/O Berlin Foundation and Crespo Foundation are showcasing two artistic practices that intertwine temporalities. Both projects take us to places where the past persists into the present day: to regions under military control, contaminated landscapes, and into the very soil. These artists make palpable those conditions that cannot be apprehended with the senses, exploring how the photographic image might operate when what needs to be shown is invisible to the eye.
Stelios Kallinikou . Cliffs Among Dreams
In his work, Cypriot artist Stelios Kallinikou (b. 1985, Cyprus) explores the Akrotiri peninsula in southern Cyprus. He has spent over a decade photographing and filming this region where ecological diversity and military use are intertwined. Akrotiri is a Sovereign Base Area, a region that remained a British overseas territory even after Cyprus gained its independence in 1960. The Royal Air Force still maintains an air force base there. Akrotiri is also where the island’s largest natural inland lake is located. The Akrotiri Salt Lake is a major wetland and stopping place for migratory birds.
Kallinikou’s photographs contain contradictions not immediately obvious. Flamingos linger in the salt lake while on its shore, antennas and radar systems soar into the air. Birds, insects, rock formations, and bodies of water intersect with military infrastructure, fences, and air traffic. Rather than being presented as a set of buildings, the British military base is shown to define how Akrotiri may be viewed, entered, and understood. These visible elements point up all that military secrecy conceals.
This exhibition brings together photographs, films, and sculptural assemblages to explore Akrotiri as a landscape that has been turned into a territory. Kallinikou traces a path from the harbor at Limassol via the salt lake to the cliffs of Aetokremnos—one of Cyprus’s most important archaeological sites. Thus, his work brings together contemporary geopolitical questions, geological periods, and questions of migration, belonging, and extinction against the backdrop of an island whose territorial boundaries have remained undefined since Turkish occupation of its northern part began in 1974.
Cliffs Among Dreams draws out these connections without reducing them to a linear narrative. Kallinikou approaches the land not as a silent surface onto which borders may be drawn or types of land use established, but rather as a conduit for stories and conflicts. Even as the ecosystem remains inextricably shaped to political systems, it also commands the place and shapes it in a way that resists territorial logic.
Susanne Kriemann . Im Fieber der Sonne flattern Schmetterlinge im Bauch
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 double exhibition is curated by Katharina Tschner, Curator at C/O Berlin. A corresponding publication will be released by Hartmann Books for each exhibition.
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.
Stelios Kallinikou (b. 1985, Cyprus) works with photography, video, and sound. His practice explores how political and ideological forces shape ideas of territory, landscape, and the body, engaging with themes of colonialism, ecology, technology, spirituality, and the power of images. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including de Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; the Ural Industrial Biennial; Foam, Amsterdam; NiMAC, Nicosia; and the Benaki Museum, Athens. From 2018 to 2019, he was a resident at Knstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and received the Foam Talent Award in 2019. He is also a co-founder of Thkio Ppalies Project Space in Nicosia.
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; Muse d’Art Moderne, Paris; C/O Berlin; and Museum fr 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 Gteborg International Biennial, the 2nd Karachi Biennale, the 5th Moscow Biennale, and the 5th Berlin Biennale. She has published eighteen artist books since 1998.
