Uqbar - 2009
01.07.2015 19:07
Susanne Kriemann – One Time One Million (Migratory Birds / Romantic Capitalism)
*** German version below *** Opening Friday, September 18, 2009, 7 p.m. Duration September 19 – November 21, 2009 In her solo exhibition for uqbar, Susanne Kriemann (*born in Erlangen in 1972, lives in Berlin and Rotterdam) presents the artwork One Time One Million (Migratory Birds/Romantic Capitalism) (2009), which was first shown at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and appears here in a new installation developed especially for the uqbar space. The point of departure for the photography book and exhibition project is a Hasselblad aerial camera from 1942, which Susanne Kriemann employs as both a camera and a historic trigger to examine aspects of the history of photography and the notion of migration as well as their relationship to modernism’s utopia of city planning. This photographic journey through the twentieth century is divided into chapters with archival images and chapters with Kriemann’s own photographs. These shots are formally interconnected in their use of strategies of classical photography such as a bird’seye view or Rodtschenko’s familiar diagonal. The content of Kriemann’s project contrasts the romantic motif of migratory birds with the politically explosive topic of migration. In the vocabulary of tourism marketing, images of migratory birds—the nomads of the air—stand for the liberated mobility of globally active individualists, while the forced travel of migrant workers and refugees under economic or political pressure is commonly represented by imagery bearing associations of poverty, filth, and misery. The photographic material from One Time One Million comprises historical shots taken with Hasselblad cameras as well as Internet images of swarms of birds and their various pictures taken by Victor Hasselblad. As the owner of Hasselblad Fotografiska AB, he was a successful businessman, and yet in his biographies he was romanticized as a passionate ornithologist, a pioneer of bird photography who published the photography book Migratory Bird Trails in 1935. Kriemann combines this archive material with the results of her photographic research on satellite cities near Stockholm http://projectspace.uqbar-ev.de/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=31&cntnt01returnid=57
Page 1 of 4