The Word Wolke

In early 2000, the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture granted the Edith Russ House for Media Art a scholarship for media art financed by funds from the film subsidy of the State of Lower Saxony for the first time.

The artist Susanne Weirich was nominated as the first scholarship holder.

Susanne Weirich, born in 1962, lives and works in Berlin, studied at the Kunstakademie Münster (with Prof. Timm Ulrichs). After her studies, she worked as an artistic assistant at the TU Berlin (FB Architektur) and completed a teaching assignment at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California in 1995/96; she has recently been appointed to a professorship at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.

The artist has been present for years in national and international group and solo exhibitions, including Das XX. Jahrhundert in Berlin, starting with the complex sound-slide installation Tokyo Rose, through such videos as Ich habe die Apokalypse verpasst (I Missed the Apocalypse), Der Kurator (The Curator) and Das Kleid (The Dress) to her most recent works with projections. The artist regularly develops installative forms with which she addresses structures of order and criteria. Language and text are employed as important media.

The audio-visual show Tokyo Rose addresses the history of speaking women and their media. The video installation Ich habe die Apokalypse verpasst (I Missed the Apocalypse) deals with the compulsion to reveal oneself in afternoon programmes in which lip service grows into embarrassing confession shows, etymologically quite correctly to be called ‘apocalypse’.

Her productions of all-work-no-play sets, which have found their way into various museum collections, have become well-known. Ironically and humorously, she offers industrially produced ‘utilitarian objects’ with which the most personal emotions can be expressed in an improved way, such as ‘sentimentally remembering a summer’, ‘confessing’ or ‘losing one's confidence’.

In Imaginery Landscapes. False Projections she projects photographic images of views onto a park and contrasts ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ meaning.

The broad spectrum of her work does not pin Susanne Weirich down to a primarily technical definition as a ‘digital media artist’. Although many new artistic techniques belong to her repertoire, of greater importance is the question concerning the usage of media and the associated structures and systems of order that she revolves around with her works. She questions the functional connections of mass media and industrial mass production just as much as she breaks with the traditions of old artistic media. A medium is not only ‘material’, but also the problem that one confronts.

Susanne Weirich has developed her own media art project for the Edith Russ Haus.