What is a photograph, and what stories are told by the elements within a photographic image? These are the questions explored by Susanne Kriemann. Her field research leads her to former uranium mining areas in the Ore Mountains and the Massif Central in the south of France, or to a steel mill in Germany’s Siegerland region. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to follow the artist’s investigations and to consider plants, minerals and metals as active agents in the production of images. It begins with footage of Monte Schlacko in Siegen, a slag heap formed as a byproduct of steel production. Its soil, which contains heavy metals, has become a habitat for rare plant species. These plants not only witness industrial production – at the same time they embody it, feeding on its waste products. The photographs and textile artworks created in Saxony, Thuringia and the Limousin region explore the afterlife of radioactive radiation. Using X-ray images and autoradiographs, Susanne Kriemann reveals the traces of uranium in plants growing in former mining areas. She traces connections between materials and forms of energy and existence that reach beyond human life. Pitchblende, the ore from which uranium is extracted, plays a special role: its radiation allows photographic images to be produced without the need for light. The darkness in the middle room of the exhibition space is reminiscent of the subterranean world of mining. Here, mining tools appear as fleeting projections.
The exhibition is a cooperation with Camera Austria and was shown in Graz from 8 March to 18 May 2025 under the title Susanne Kriemann: Ray, Rock, Rowan (Being a Photograph, curated by Margit Neuhold. It was then expanded for the presentation in Leipzig. The reader is available at the GfZK.
A reader accompanying the exhibition was published by Edition Camera Austria. Designed by James Langdon, it brings texts by Siobhan Angus, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Zippora Elders, Daisy Hildyard, Bhanu Kapil, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Lisa Rosendahl, and an introduction by Margit Neuhold and Christina Töpfer.
