Anett Stuth: Sein Schein Nichtsein

Anett Stuth’s photographs do not so much record the world as recombine it. Born in Leipzig in 1965 and trained at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, Stuth works in large formats, taking fragments from painting, film, theatre and the shared stock of media memory, lifting them out of their original settings and setting them down in new and frequently impossible surroundings. The results are less collage in the conventional sense than spaces of thought in which separate historical moments are made to occupy a single room.

A telling example: the emblem of the GDR, borrowed from the Palace of the Republic, appears to hang in front of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, dislodged from both its place and its period. In another picture Picasso stands before a twenty-first-century Hamlet like a conjuror of stage light. Stuth describes this procedure as a kind of sampling, and it moves the viewer’s attention across disciplines — from painting to film history, from theatre to photography, from history to ordinary life.

Sein Schein Nichtsein gathers works made between 2003 and 2014, among them the photographic collage series Landschaften and Raum—Zeit—Bild. Running through them is one persistent question: what can photographs still communicate, and by what means? The title holds that instability in place — semblance, being, non-being — as the images seem at once to assert and to withdraw the reality they show. To put this body of work between covers is itself an editorial act: a defined period, identifiable series, and images set alongside a written contribution.

Hatje Cantz published the volume in 2015 with 128 pages and 94 photographs, hardcover, 252 × 290 mm, in a German and English edition. Kerstin Riedel designed the book; Michaela Nolte contributed the accompanying text. Its publication coincided with presentations of the work at Galerie Priess, Hamburg, Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach, and Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig, in 2015–16.

For a collector, the book’s weight lies in condensing a decade of concentrated production into a single document at a moment when Stuth’s method — quoting, splicing, restaging — was being worked through across several related series. The title functions as a key as well: pairing appearance with non-existence, it reminds us that the force of these pictures depends on their refusal to settle.

Anett Stuth (*1965 in Leipzig) redefines photographic space; she opens up time loops and spaces of thought: in one of her pictures, for example, we see the emblem of the GDR from the Palace of the Republic in front of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, fallen through space and time. Another photograph features Picasso enchanting a twenty-first-century Hamlet like a stage lighting magician. The photographer, who studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, combines her large-format photographs with visual quotes from our collective media memory. In doing so, in a kind of sampling she shifts the perspective from painting to the history of film or theater, from photography to history or to everyday life. Stuth’s works combine quotes, develop puzzling associations, and inquire into the power of expression of photography. What can photography communicate in this day and age? The volume pursues these questions based on a selection of the artist’s works from 2003 to 2014.
 
Exhibitions 2015/16:  Galerie Priess, Hamburg I Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach I Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig

Designed by: Kerstin Riedel
Texts by: Michaela Nolte
German, English
March 2015, 128 Pages , 94 Photos
hardcover
252mm x 290mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3916-0

Publisher page editorial text:
| Photographic collages from the series Landschaften and Raum—Zeit— Bild
Anett Stuth (*1965 in Leipzig) redefines photographic space; she opens up time loops and spaces of thought: in one of her pictures, for example, we see the emblem of the GDR from the Palace of the Republic in front of Schinkel’s Altes Museum, fallen through space and time. Another photograph features Picasso enchanting a twenty-first-century Hamlet like a stage lighting magician. The photographer, who studied at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, combines her large-format photographs with visual quotes from our collective media memory. In doing so, in a kind of sampling she shifts the perspective from painting to the history of film or theater, from photography to history or to everyday life. Stuth’s works combine quotes, develop puzzling associations, and inquire into the power of expression of photography. What can photography communicate in this day and age? The volume pursues these questions based on a selection of the artist’s works from 2003 to 2014.
 

Exhibitions 2015/16:  Galerie Priess, Hamburg I Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengladbach I Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig

Publisher source ↗