Published in conjunction with a series of installations at KIOSK in Ghent and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Susanne Kriemann’s artist’s book is an investigation into the way we as a culture interpret, experience, and remember place by employing various methods (photography, collaborative archeological exploration) and historical doctrines.
In his short curatorial essay, KIOSK’s Wim Waelput describes the book thus: “It can be read as an inventory of the trajectory that Susanne Kriemann pursued in relation to archaeology, to the artefact, to the image of the individual at work and the idea of the desert as a symbol of the modern desire to create an empty slate, a tabula rasa. Material from Agatha Christie’s photographic archives is related to photographs that Kriemann produced of the Syrian desert and archaeological sites in Mesopotamia. This associative working method allows the artist to ‘dig towards the past’ and to disassociate the ‘idea of modernity’ from all ideological connotations, and in this way analyze the writing of recent history as a formal system of organization.”