— ahorn.

© Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunen, Untitled (from the series ‘PEMOHT’), 1989-1995 / 2013, C-print framed by the artist, 73 x 90 cm, (Lava)


From the press release:

Galerie Nordenhake is pleased to present PEMOHT, an exhibition by Finnish photographers Esko Männikkö and Pekka Turunen. The title takes its’ name from a photographic essay realised by the two artists in conjunction over a seven year period between 1989 and 1995. Previously only exhibited in Scandinavia and Russia, this will be the first time this significant series is reassembled and can be seen in its’ almost integrality since shortly after its’ completion. This will also be the first time both artists will be shown together in a gallery context.
The title PEMOHT refers to the Cyrillic script for the Russian word Remont – a term which can be translated as reparation and stands as the euphemistic and tragic symbol for the collapse of a country and the subsequent failure of its’ institutions, devices and social structures. Within the immediate wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution the two photographers travelled to the Kola Peninsula, a remote area on the border of northern Finland. At the beginning of the Soviet period the peninsula was heavily industrialised and militarised, largely due to its’ strategic position and the discovery of the vast nickel and heavy metal deposits in the 1920s. As a result, the ecology of the area suffered major ecological damage, including contamination by military nuclear waste and nickel smelting.
Set against the bleak backdrop of this violated area, Männikkö and Turunen’s colour photographs set out to document the everyday reality of a disenfranchised community living on the margins during times of major transition. A haunting document of post-Soviet living conditions, PEMOHT captures this new reality with poetry, clarity and grit.

© Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunen, Untitled (from the series ‘PEMOHT’), 1989-1995 / 2013, C-print framed by the artist, 41.5 x 44.5 cm, (Cleaning berries)



© Esko Männikkö & Pekka Turunen, Untitled (from the series ‘PEMOHT’), 1989-1995 / 2013, C-print framed by the artist, 67 x 85 cm, (Cleaning car)

Esko Männikkö, Pekka Turunen, Pemoht
Galerie Nordenhake
April, 27 – June 22, 2013

Joakim Eskildsen “Cards, Selma, California, 2011″, © Joakim Eskildsen, courtesy Gallery TAIK

From the press release:

The ongoing project Home Works is sort of an artistic homecoming for Eskildsen who, after traveling the world for numerous photographic projects, turned back to his beginnings, and to the things that had so much inspired him when he first started taking pictures around his home at the age of 14. Already in those earliest photographs, Eskildsen shows a sensitivity for light and certain weather conditions that his work is still known for today. Since the beginning of the project in 2005, Eskildsen, and worked on the project around six homes in three countries, and become father of a son and a daughter who naturally become part of the project as well.

In 2011, Eskildsen was commissioned by Kira Pollack, Director of Photography at TIME Magazine, to capture the growing crisis in the U.S. During the time-span of seven months, he traveled through New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia, places that according to census data have the highest poverty rate. The outcome is American Realities, a stunning body of work in which Eskildsen has managed to make personal portraits of people living below the poverty line to many of who the myth of the American Dream had lost its raison d´être. The book American Realities will be published by Steidl in 2013.

Joakim Eskildsen, American Realities/Home Works
Gallery TAIK
April 26 – June 1, 2013

© Dirk Braeckman, T.C.-T.H.-11

From the press release:

With their matte surfaces, gray scales and unclear motifs, the black-and- white photographs of the Belgian artist Dirk Braeckman (born in 1958) are utterly enigmatic. Working on the boundaries of the medium of photography, they combine fleetingness and substance, texture and distance. The pictures don’t tell stories, though one might be tempted to think so. Leaving the moment in which the image was captured behind, each work reveals the diffuse process behind its own creation.
Several of the new works featured at the exhibition in the Galerie Thomas Fischer were made for Dirk Braeckman’s recent show at de Appel arts center in Amsterdam. Included is also a recent film by the artist.

Dirk Braeckman
Galerie Thomas Fischer
April 26 – June 15, 2013

1. Nicolai Howalt, Borderline #16, 2012
2. Trine Søndergaard, Guldnakke #1, 2012
3. Nicolai Howalt, Rusland #31, 2011
4. Nicolai Howalt, Car Crash Study #5, 2009

Nicolai Howalt & Trine Søndergaard, Selected Works
February 21 – April 13, 2013
Bruce Silverstein, New York

Read an interview with Trine Søndergaard in Issue 6 of Ahorn Magazine.

© Christer Strömholm, Fox-Amphoux 1965

Michael Schmidt, Lebensmittel
January 12 – April 1, 2013
Martin-Gropius-Bau

Margaret Bourke White, Photographs 1930-1945
January 18 – April 14, 2013
Martin-Gropius-Bau

Christer Strömholm, Post Scriptum
January 19 – March 17, 2013
C/O Berlin

Ulrich Seidl, Paradies
January 19 – March 17, 2013
C/O Berlin

The Feverish Library (continued)
works by J. Baldessari, C. Höfer, A. Kruithof, J. Stezaker, J. Wall, C. Williams
January 19 – February 23, 2013
Capitain Petzel Gallery

Male Nudes – Female Desires
photographs by Jen Davis, Nina Hoffmann, Lina Scheynius and Paula Winkler
January 25 – March 2, 2013
Galerie Tania Wagner

Asger Carlsen, Hester
February 1 – March 16, 2013
Diettrich & Schlechtriem

Wiebke Loeper, Welcome Home
February 2 – March 9, 2013
Galerie cubus-m

Gerry Johansson, Deutschland
February 16 – March 30, 2013
Swedish Photography

Nina Poppe, AMA
February 16 – May 18, 2013
Robert Morat Galerie

© Christian Patterson, House at Night, from the series “Redheaded Peckerwood”

Christian Patterson, Redheaded Peckerwood
December 8 – February 9, 2013
Robert Morat Galerie

Opening Reception: Friday, December 7, 2012 at 7pm

© Peter Piller, Umschläge #21, 2011-2012

Tatsächliche Vermutungen (real assumptions) are based on principles drawn from life experience. The concept of ‘assumption‘ as it is used here derives from the meaning of the word ‘assume‘ in its general usage, in the sense of presuming something to be correct.‘“
(Prof. Hans Joachim Musielak, Juristische Arbeitsblätter 8-9 (2010), 561)

From the press release:
Piller has been working with images from archives as well as his own photographs and drawings since the 1990s.
In Tatsächliche Vermutungen, he establishes relationships between his most recent groups of works. Two of the great themes of human activity are linked visually: sexuality and death. Umschläge (2011-12), a block of 30 works is presented in the main space of the gallery; in these works, Piller examined, isolated and removed the text from the front and back covers of more than twenty years of issues (from the 1960s to the 1980s) of the East German army‘s magazine Armeerundschau and transformed them into two-part images presented on the wall. On the left side of each, a (clothed) woman looks directly at the viewers; initially, she and her surroundings seem to have absolutely no connection to the military image on the right side of each pair. In the original, the warlike armoured vehicles pictured on the right were on the front cover of the army magazine, and the women – sometimes depicted in a suggestive manner – were to be found on its back cover, in an East German variation on the pin-up girl.
Piller‘s intervention renders both systems simultaneously visible, and they bear a direct historical relationship to the gallery‘s exhibition space in Berlin‘s Karl-Marx-Allee, where – until 1989 – the East German military had passed in review before the East German government.

In the large-scale wall installation Immer Noch Sturm, 2012 (Still Storming), Piller combines images of World War I battlefields from historical postcards and found photos from books with seascapes from a 1920s geography textbook in order to create a grid of 24 black-and-white prints and distributed blank spaces. The landscape photographs – documents of humanity‘s excesses of destruction – and the images of the forces of nature on the open sea equal one another in terms of their immoderation. In relation to the art historical genre of battle paintings, both on land and at sea, Piller depicts the locations of violent conflicts as empty stages left behind by the actors.

On the lower floor of the gallery, Piller shows Tatsächliche Vermutungen, the 2012 series that provided the exhibition with its title. This wall projection consists of 30 motifs in the form of black-and-white stills of (once again) deserted locations taken from a German detective series of the 1970s. All of these consist of fixed and isolatedon-location shots from the existing film material. In this series, Piller deals with the issue of the credibility of supposedly documentary crime scene images just as he also thematises our presuppositions when viewing hackneyed images – in a context where dread seems perfectly at home within the familiar.

The Archiv Peter Piller, which consists largely of images from German regional newspapers, contains more than 100 groups of collected images which complexly reflect Piller‘s original search for the unintentionally aesthetic and noteworthy image.

Peter Piller, Tatsächliche Vermutungen
through December 22, 2012
Capitain Petzel Gallery

© John Stezaker, Siren Song V, 2011

Diane Arbus, Retrospective
Through September 24, 2012
Martin-Gropius-Bau

Thomas Demand, Model Studies
September 7 – October 20, 2012
Esther Schipper / Sprüth Magers Berlin

Yutaka Takanashi, Toshi-e
September 14 – November 3, 2012
Buchmann Box

Bernhard Fuchs, Höfe/Farms
September 15 – December 1, 2012
Robert Morat Galerie

Jörg Sasse, Common Places
September 15 – October 28, 2012
C/O Berlin

Willem Popelier, Talents 29
September 15 – November 27, 2012
C/O Berlin

Zoé Beausire. Rosette, Mauricette et Roby
September 18 – October 12, 2012
Kominek Gallery

Dennis Hopper, The Lost Album
September 20 – December 17, 2012
Martin-Gropius-Bau

Richard Mosse, Infra
September 28 – October 21, 2012
Künstlerhaus Bethanien

Lars Tunbjörk, Vinter
October 20 – December 15, 2012
Swedish Photography

Echoes, Osktreuzschule für Fotografie
October 26 – November 17, 2012
Ehemaliges Kaufhaus Maassen

Joel Sternfeld, Retrospective
November 3, 2012 – January 3, 2013
C/O Berlin

2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
Pieter Hugo, Rinko Kawauchi, John Stezaker, Christopher Williams
November 3, 2012 – January 13, 2013
C/O Berlin

On Borders, Ostkreuz Agency
November 9 – December 30, 2012
Haus der Kulturen der Welt