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SUPERNATURAL.

Faces as masks as grids – Katja Stuke’s series Supernatural Katja Stuke’s photographic faces of high-performance female athletes from the series Supernatural take their starting point in the early 2000s. Photographed from television screens during the competition broadcasts of the Olympic Games in Sydney (2000), Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), London (2012), Rio (2016), Pyeongchang (2018), they bear the technical signature of an era before our age of super high-definition. Reframed to the vertical format and rasterized through the surface of the screen, they acquire a peculiarly hybrid status between portrait and cinematographic close-up, and in their uncanny stillness pose the question of the human remnant of the image-formed face. Immersed in total concentration, clearly aware of the decisive moment of their sportswomen’s lives, these faces unfold the peculiar aura of our medial age: they are close to us and yet so far away, they are pure medial surface, grid-pattern, and as individuals behind it as hidden as behind the mesh of the fencer’s mask. In contrast to the cinema screen, the close-up is frozen here, the expressive and emotional potential of the face set to zero, in perfect mastery they have become more like machines than human – supernatural”. Florian Ebner

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CCTV – NATIONALFEIERTAG.

Katja Stuke’s practice begins with surveillance. The process, two-fold: her tourist-like filming of people in heavily watched and monitored public spaces and her use of the raw footage in a secondary process, where photographs are taken from the screen. The editing is where the work takes shape and sequence. The aesthetic is one of paused video stills – cathode ray tube portraits.

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TREES IN UKRAINE.


»Every day bad news from/about Ukraine. Still. Every day a new name of a village, town or city in Ukraine. Every day a screenshot-photo of a tree in that town. A tree to just hold in for a moment. A tree as a reminder. A tree as a witness. A tree as a metaphor for time.« Since Feb 24, 2022

exhibited at:
2023 Schaplatz WELTKUNSTZIMMER Düsseldorf
2023 DIE GROSSE, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
2024 Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
2024/25 Neue Fotografie, Public Screen Düsseldorf

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MIMIC.

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MOON OVER KONOHANA.

exhibited at:
2023 Border_less, Japanisches Kulturinsitut, Japan Foundation Cologne
2020 Moon over Konohana, Japanisches Kulturinsitut, Japan Foundation Cologne
2019 From the Rocket to the Moon. Parrotta Contemporary Art Cologne.

moonoverkonohana.org »»

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CCTV

Katja Stuke’s work is based on video footage she created herself that features people in brief, isolated moments and anonymous situations.

exhibited at:
2019 »Sequence as a Dialogue« Kunsthalle Gießen
2016 »Im Angesicht« Kunstmusem Bonn
2010 »(Out of) Control« [G] Les Brasseurs Art Contemporain, BIP Liège
2008 »Beautiful World« Städt. Galerie im Haus der Kultur, Waldkraiburg
2007 »Mistigris – Contemporary German Photography« [G] Gallery at UTA University of Texas
2005 »Das soll Kunst sein« [G] Kunstverein Freiburg
2004 Oliver Sieber und Katja Stuke, Galerie Gaby Kraushaar
2004 Pingyao International Photo Festival China
2003 »Dokumentation« [G] Fotogalerie Wien
2003 »Wonderlands, Perspektiven aktueller Photographie« [G] Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg

CCTV – Osaka Private, Osaka Public

CCTV – Redhead

Könnte Sein

Suits

Katja Stuke’s hybrid mixtures of video and photography also explore specific types and characters, but they represent the continuation of a different kind of tradition – that of the anonymous street portrait. For her series Suits she films passers-by in London, Tokyo, Osaka and New York, as they scurry here and there. She further edits the material in front of her computer screen, capturing the exact moment on the monitor when an individual emerges from the masses.

exhibited at:
2016 Kunstmuseum Bonn
2011 Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig
2010 BIP Biennale de l’Image Possible Liège
2008 Bespoke Gallery, New York

Eleven to Liverpoolstreet

Pedestrians and bankers – from an surveillance point of view and portraits of (masked) protesters – from a face-to-face perspective –  who stopped the traffic in the City of London with their Anti-G20-summit-demonstrations

exhibited at:
2016 Kunstmuseum Bonn
2011 Kunsthaus Essen
2010 BIP Biennale de l’Image Possible Liège

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Mechanical Brides / Cry Minami

Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf 2017

The title of series ‹Mechanical Brides› refers to an early book by Marshall McLuhan with the same title. It deals with questions about newspapers, comics, and advertisements and also reflects the role of women in popular culture. With the camera I was taking lots of photos from billboards showing portraits of women in Japan, America and Europe. These image are interesting as these models become role models for a lot of women. I worked on some of these images and produced stickers which I put back into the streets—to react on advertising companies putting into the streets and public spaces to claim back these spaces.

exhibited at:
2019 »Sequence as a Dialogue« Kunsthalle Gießen
2018 »Cry Minami« UNSEEN Amsterdam
2018 »Cry Minami« Talk- and Printshow, in)(between gallery Paris
2017 »Werbung« Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf

Kunsthalle Giessen 2019

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Sky Electric

Equivalents, Kunstraum Düsseldorf 2017

»If, as Gottfried Jäger says, there are two great photographic cultures, the imitative, mimetic, which ‚takes‘ the images, and the imagecreating, poetic, which ‚gives‘ them, „Equivalents“ are images with a positive trade balance: They take and give alike; Descriptive and connotative, they are not only obligated to record a reality of any kind, but also record the photographer’s attention: his mental as well as physical choices of design, where Friedrich Schleiermacher is speaking , the infinite is looked at in the finite.« (Anja Schürmann, Equivalents 2017)

exhibited at:
2017 »Equivalents« Kunstraum Düsseldorf, curated by Anja Schürmann

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Arbeitstätten

Es geht zum einen um die unterschiedlichen Aspekte von „Arbeitsstätten“, wie z.B. die veränderten Arbeitsstätten seit der Industrialisierung und durch die Digitalisierung, um reale und virtuelle Büros und Konferenzräume, um Geld und Roboter, Raster und Fassaden. Zum Anderen geht es aber auch um konkrete Arbeit und Arbeitsbedingungen als Fotokünstlerin, und um das Verständnis von Fotografie und Archiven, um den Umgang mit eigenen Foto-Archiven und den Umgang mit gefundenem Material zur Recherche aber auch als künstlerisches Material.

exhibited at:
2016 »Vom Wert der Kunst als Wert der Arbeit« [G] curated by Sabine Maria Schmidt, HPZ-Stiftung Düsseldorf

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Lonely Planet.

For Katja Stuke the camera is never just a machine for depicting reality. It is instead a problematic instrument for coping with worlds of images, which explains why her new small publication is a guidebook, an ironic commentary and a low-key artist’s book in the tradition of Ed Ruscha’s self-published books. Marshalling generic and generated images to examine the invisibility of Internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo Stuke has produced a slim soft-cover book with black-and-white photographs and short texts. In addition to the pictures Stuke made in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, there are images extracted from the Internet: portraits of Google employees, exterior views of the headquarters of the major players, simulated pictures form the Sims, Second Life or satellite images. The reader gradually learns more about these pictures, their sources and their content through subheadings and information provided about locations and the individual companies. As Paul Virilio once said about the nature of knowledge in the Internet age, the seeds of the apple can now found on its skin. Netizen can use this tightly edited book to explore those seeds and the manifestation and new topographies of the Web. Sebastian Hau, FOAM Magazine #23

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Photobattle: heaven has a corridor.

The Photobattle between Katja Stuke & Yoshinori Henguchi.

performance and exhibition at:
2011 Baikado gallery, Osaka
2011 Bloom gallery, Osaka
2011 U-Bahn subwaystation Düsseldorf
2011 Create Party, studio Düsseldorf

more»»

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Cities change the Songs of Birds

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Meet me in Quarantine.

find collaborative works by Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber here »»