Chris Bierl – Graben

Emde Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Chris Bierl from October 13th to November 25th. Chris Bierl's work, which encompasses photography, installation and video, deals intensively with the relationship between people and nature. His photographs are often taken on the road, on journeys to distant, remote regions of the earth. His exhibition at Emde Gallery features works from his photographic series "A One Storied Country". In 2017, 2018 and 2020, the artist spent several weeks with his camera exploring the region of the Techa River, a river in Russia, east of the Ural Mountains. It became known for its radioactive contamination after the third largest nuclear disaster after Chernobyl and Fukushima occurred in 1957 at the Mayak nuclear power plant near the town of Kyshtym, contaminating the river and its surroundings. His photographic investigation led Chris Bierl to numerous other places in the region marked by heavy industry and environmental pollution. In his mainly large-format colour photographs, for example, he deals with the current appearance of the town of Karabash, which is dominated by a copper-processing plant that has brought work to the people living there but has also systematically destroyed the region's nature. The series mainly includes large- and medium-format landscape motifs and architectural photographs, which are characterized by a clear formal language. In terms of content, Chris Bierl brings to the fore the devastating effects of the Anthropocene, the impacts and changes that have occurred due to human intervention in nature, and thus also raises the question of man's responsibility towards the landscape. In doing so, his photographic images reveal a central contradiction: on the one hand, they show a landscape thoroughly destroyed by man; on the other hand, the artist captures the depiction of destruction, even ugliness, in an aesthetically successful composition - an ambivalence that runs like a red thread through his photography. This gives his works a complexity that only becomes apparent after prolonged viewing. In addition to the landscapes, the exhibition in the back room presents a large-format portrait of a child, or more precisely, an orphan boy named Vanya from Rosa, a decaying city characterized by mining and heavy industry on the edge of the disused Korkino coal mine, the deepest quarry in Eurasia. The color-framed photo wallpaper on which the portrait is installed testifies to the poor condition of the buildings. It shows the facade of a simple, multi-story residential building with clear signs of weathering (although the wall mural does not depict the city of Rosa, but rather Kasli, a small working-class town next to Kyshtym in Chelyabinsk Oblast). This installation, consisting of a work on a photo wallpaper, matching wall paint and photography, is based on a concept by the artist that he developed specifically for the exhibition. A selection of the group of works "A One Storied Country", accompanied by a comprehensive publication of the same name, was shown in his solo exhibition "Mutual Adaption" at the Kallmann Museum Ismaning in 2022 and in the group exhibition "9:9:2" at KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Studio 8 Berlin. Chris Bierl (born 1980) lives and works in Berlin. Works by the artist have been shown in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions. He has been awarded several prizes, most recently the prestigious Kallmann Prize 2021. Scholarships have taken him to Japan, France and Mongolia, among other places. Dr. Annette Emde