Susa Templin
This is the second solo exhibition featuring Susa Templin, winner of the International WeldeKunstpreis for Photography in 2013, at the Thomas Rehbein Gallery.
“The space in which we live, from which we are drawn out, in which the erosion of our lives, our time, and our history takes place, this space that gnaws at us and washes us away, is itself a heterogeneous space. In other words: we do not live in a void where individuals and things can simply be situated. We do not live within a void that is later colored with bright hues.
We live within a mixture of relationships that define placements, which cannot be traced back to one another and cannot be unified.” (Michel Foucault, 1967)
Susa Templin's theme is space. In her photographic work, which includes analog single images, thematic series, drawn sketches, and expansive installations, the artist engages with both the objective, architectural structure of space and the space and its inventory as a reservoir for memories, feelings, and subjective experiences. Through her entanglement in stories and memories, objects become storage media for a universal, timeless spatial memory.
Templin uses photography as both medium and material.
Photographs of urban spaces, interiors, and fragmentary shots of spatial inventory are cut and glued, photographed multiple times, collaged, layered, and integrated into spaces or small crafted spatial models.
Architecture is linked with installation, transforming flat photography into sculpture. Her installations are walkable. They establish a concrete connection to a location, suggest perspectives, niches, or angles, and evoke individual spatial concepts.
In her search for visual solutions, Susa Templin repeatedly relates her own body to the space and incorporates the act of photographing itself.
Characterized by pale, atmospheric colors, partial blurriness, and multiple exposures, the motifs of furniture, curtains, the artist's legs, doors, and windows make the physical dimension of spatial memory tangible.
(Miriam Walgate, 2015)