ONE DAY

Susanne Kriemann’s ONE DAY is the third book in a series of portraits, in book form, of the City of Rotterdam, that Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art has been producing in collaboration with artists who are particularly concerned with photographic medium.

Kriemann is an artist whose work explores how images circulate and how displacement is represented in photography. For this project Kriemann collected a long list of books about Rotterdam, all of which have been published since its devastating bombing by the Luftwaffe in May 1940. The second largest city in The Netherlands and arguably the most culturally diverse, Rotterdam is unique in that its rebuilding did not focus on restoring the pre-war urban fabric, but instead became a multi-faceted experiment in architecture and urban planning that at times mirrors, and at times seems at odds with its evolving social composition. From the books she collected, which document Rotterdam’s evolution, Kriemann selected 115 images and imposed a structure that is at once drastic and mundane: The flow of images in her book condense the experience of time by subtly tracing the course of one day, from dawn until dusk.

If information and representations today are perpetually “under-construction” within the digital world, might the printed book remain a place of rest and of in-depth reflection where one reading is not enough? How does the building a new book entirely out of existing books reconsider the ecology of the image and the social fabric of the city, making palpable the abstract notions of second readings, second takes and even second lives? These are just some of the questions raised by ONE DAY.

In order to explore Susanne Kriemann’s process – particularly her way of working with photographs and with books – Witte de With has invited the New York-based curator and writer Christopher Eamon to conduct an interview with the artist on the occasion of the launch of ONE DAY at the 2010 New York Art Book Fair. Eamon, who has worked chiefly with moving images, having curated one of the most prestigious collections of video art in the United States, brings his experience to an encounter with Kriemann’s dialectical art.

Colophon
Witte de With Publishers, 2010
Concept: Susanne Kriemann
Editors: Nicolaus Schafhausen, Monika Szewczyk
Production: Amira Gad, Susanne Kriemann, Monika Szewczyk
Assistance: Miki Kanai, Ilka Tödt
Images: Book includes a detailed listing of sources with original captions
Design: Lambl/Homburger
Printed and bound at: Lecturis, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
ISBN: 978-90-73362-95-6
Price: €25 $30 £22
Artist-print: € 10, Artist-print with purchase of the book: € 5

This book is available at Witte de With and via the following distributors:
D.A.P., New York (USA only)
www.artbook.com
dap@dapinc.com
T: +1 212 627 1999.

Cornerhouse, Manchester (UK and Ireland only),
www.cornerhouse.org
publications@cornerhouse.org
T: +44 161 2001503

Idea Books, Amsterdam, (The Netherlands and all other countries, except the Americas)
www.ideabooks.nl
idea@ideabooks.nl
T: +31 (0)20 622 61 54

Susanne Kriemann
is an artist based in Rotterdam and Berlin. She studied conceptual art and photography at the Akademie der Künste Stuttgart, and attended the ‘programme de recherché’ at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Currently she is a researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts KASK in Gent, Belgium. In nearly all her projects, Kriemann has decoded buildings and other large structures as physical embodiments of ideology and forgotten meaning. She interrogates them with a view to their social suggestiveness in order to bring out the paradoxes they incorporate.
Recent projects include Ashes and broken brickwork of a logical theory(Künstlerhaus Stuttgart 2009, Kiosk Gent 2010, RaebervonStenglin Zürich 2010, Berlinische Galerie Berlin 2010, CAG Vancouver 2010), One Time One Million (Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2009; uqbar, Berlin, 2009; Villa Grohmann, Lodz, 2009), 12 650 000 (5th berlin biennial for contemporary art, 2008), The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths (Wilfried Lentz Galerie, Rotterdam, 2008),Ramses Files (as part of The Archeologists at Ursula Blickle Foundation, Kraichtal 2009; Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2006, The Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, 2006) and Not Quite Replica – Meteorite (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2005).

For over a decade Christopher Eamon was curator of the internationally respected Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection in San Francisco, guiding acquisitions and curating exhibitions that contextualized the collection’s holdings. Exhibitions include Silent Treatment and Bill Viola: The Crossing (both at the Aspen Art Museum, 1999) Video Acts: Single-Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust (PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and ICA London, 2002-2003) and Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection, 1963-2005 (Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin, 2006). More Recently, his exhibitions A Rictus Grin(Broadway 1602, New York, 2008) and Accidental Modernism (Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York 2008), combined historical and contemporary works in diverse media. His publications include an anthology on the history and significance of projected images in art from the 18th Century to present entitled Art of Projection, co-edited with artist Stan Douglas (Hatje Cantz, 2009).