Satellite Salon // Archives

an evening of art-science conversations

with presentations by:
Dr Etienne Benson, Mariana Castillo Deball, Susanne Kriemann

Berlin Mitte
Tuesday 6th September 2011

Our presenters:

Dr Etienne Benson is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte where he is participating in the working group ‘The Regulatory Archive: Conservation Biology and the State of Endangerment’. His research focuses on the intersection of science and politics in the practice of conservation. In 2010 he published Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife.

Mariana Castillo Deball is currently a visual arts guest of the DAAD in Berlin. Her work engages with site-specific practices and institutional critique combined with approaches to archaeology, literature, and science. Memory, museums, exhibitions, archaeological finds and their display all inform and make up her approach to how the present is constituted by the past. She is represented by Barbara Wien.

Susanne Kriemann is an artist and 2010 recipient of the GASAG Art Prize, awarded to Berlin-based artists whose work explores the interface between art, science and technology. Her work stems from research and reprinting of historical pictures and other archival materials which she combines with her own new photographs.

Our guests:

DS Allen is a photographer based in Berlin and London, His practice is centred on the urban environment and the gap between how the eye sees the world and how the camera represents it. In a number of parallel series drawn from repeated extended walks around the city, his photographs present the ordinary in an extraordinary way..

Cordula Gdaniec is a cultural geographer interested in urban life in all its diverse forms, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. She is currently project managing a touring exhibition for the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst on the Nazi war against the Soviet Union.

Aleksander Komarov, an artist who lives in Berlin and Rotterdam, creates work engaging with political and social institutions, ideology and image. Together with Susanne Kriemann he is Curatorial Manager of the artist residency programme Air Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Alfonso Mendibe has a biologist background and is now a conservator. He is an avid collector of mid-20th century ceramics created during a post-war divided Germany.

Ricardo Okaranza is a photographer with a 25-year career as a professional conservator specialising in polychrome sculpture. His collection of over 3000 mass-produced German industrial ceramics feature in his work, objects which are omitted from design and craft histories, signalling a willful cultural amnesia.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Schnalke trained as a doctor and gained his Habilitation in the History of Medicine. He is the Director of the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charite and has published and organised many exhibitions on the history of medicine as well as curating art exhibitions in medical contexts.

Lena Ziese is a professor of art and curation at the university of Weimar. For several years she ran Jet project space in Berlin Mitte. She is currently working on a number of artistic projects that involve archives and she collects and shows media images of politicians, business people and celebrities, making subtle shifts to the grammar of their poses and gestures.

Image: Susanne Kriemann, Untitled (A Silent Crazy Jungle under Glass), 2011. Courtesy the artist.