Das Deutsche Kulturzentrum Iasi und Bordeline Art Space lädt Sie zur Eröffnung der Fotoausstellung „Night tremor. Psychographics of a city“ am Montag, den 2. Dezember ab 18:00 Uhr im Borderline Art Space ein. Die Ausstellung wird von Laura Tammen kuratiert und zeigt eine Auswahl von Werken der deutschen Künstlerin Katrin Streicher, die bis zum 20. Januar 2020 in der Galerie Borderline Art Space zu besichtigen sind. In demselben Zeitraum werden 10 Fotografien aus derselben Serie in der Buchhandlung Art + Design ausgestellt.
Katrin Streicher’s series Night Time Tremors was created between 2014 and 2017 in the northernmost city of Sweden. Kiruna was founded under its current name in 1900 and has since then served to mine iron ore. To this day, the city follows the parameters of the Swedish mining company LKAB, which has decided to relocate Kiruna due to large iron ore deposits below the city centre. The explosions, which are used to extract the precious magnetite in the underground, are triggered after midnight and make the city tremble – hence the title of the series.
Although the ongoing migration marks a tragic turning point for the humans living and working in Kiruna, Katrin Streicher’s intention is neither to evaluate the situation nor to take position within the current discourse. As a visual anthropologist, she is compiling material in order to describe the human condition in a certain moment going through a time of upheaval. Nonetheless, the quake and the darkness, impermanence and uncertainty are symptomatic of Kiruna and the series of Night Time Tremors. It thus becomes a kind of psychogram of the city’s instability, a city, which is threatened to sink. Most of the photographies seem like film stills, neat, self-contained, composed and framed as tableaux, but these are not dramatically staged scenes – the photographer has approached the place and moment with special sensibility in order to capture the city of Kiruna and its inhabitants from a decidedly personal and artistic point of view.
The artist makes us become observers of low-traffic streets, of houses in which no light burns, which may be uninhabited by now. This perceived agony is intensified by the glaring street lamps, whose light illuminates nothing but the snow, the empty house facades and the objectively ironic motorboat, which makes the surrounding black of the night stand out all the more conspicuously and underlines a feeling of absence. Loneliness and lack of communication, a palpable silence is predominant in the street shots, the portraits and the still lifes. The individual fates of the people of Kiruna illustrate in particular the house interiors, shaped by the people who live in them. In one of these still lifes, Giovanni Bragolin’s weeping boy looks at us, forming part of a house’s interior as if somebody had foreseen his destiny. Below the picture an idyllic village landscape and next to it a mirror, reflecting stairs that seem to lead into the unknown. A layer of powerlessness covers the portrayed Kirunians, whose lives in Kiruna go on and are shaped by the oscillations recorded by the LKAB geophones, a device that looks like a relic from a post-apocalyptic movie.
Katrin Streicher (born 1980, lives and works in Berlin) studied Photography at the Staatliche Fachakademie für Fotodesign in Munich and holds a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. In 2015 she completed the Postgraduate Class of the Ostkreuz School for Photography in Berlin. She is member of Women Photograph. Her work has been exhibited at several solo shows in Germany and numerous international group shows and renowned festivals. Katrin Streicher has been nominated for photography prizes and awards, recently she was finalist of the New Visions Award (2018) and she won the Kunstpreis Fotografie Lotto Brandenburg (2019). In 2011 she published the photobook In Between. Siberia China Mongolia (Nimbus. Kunst und Bücher, Zurich). A book about the series Night Time Tremors is in progress and will be printed with XXX in XX.
Parallel to the show at Borderline Art Space, a selection of another 10 works from this series is on view at Art+Design bookstore.
Laura Tammen worked for over 10 years as curator and associate director for Kewenig Gallery (Cologne, Germany; Palma de Mallorca, Spain) and Galeria Senda (Barcelona, Spain), where she curated individual and group exhibitions of both emerging and well-known artists. Since 2015 she is an independent curator and art counselor, collaborator of an art foundation, art galleries and international independent emerging artists. Together with partner, Tsering Fryman-Glen, she co-founded in 2016 Tangent Projects, a non-commercial platform encouraging experimental art.
