Nocturne

An exhibition with Ania Sudbin, curated by Manu Gruber and Christiane Meister.

Ania Sudbin's visual worlds show seemingly ordinary everyday subjects:

A patch of woodland, a garden fence, a petrol station or the young people next door. Sometimes a landscape appears as a panorama, sometimes a structure filling the pictorial space, such as a rowan bush, covers the photograph; sometimes a portrait of a person or a spider appears in close-up.

The exhibition presents photographs from different series, including 'Jugendliche', 'Nachts in Brandenburg', 'Arkenberge' and 'Übersinnlich', made during nocturnal excursions through Brandenburg over recent years. The photographer gently captures her surroundings, focusing on what seems insignificant.

The light of night often envelops these scenes of rural idyll in an uncanny, magical atmosphere. The idyllic seems to be taken to absurd extremes. Abandoned blocks of houses. Brandenburg bleakness? The cosiness and homeliness of small-town views almost tip over into the uncanny. Silence.

One senses a deep connection with nature, sometimes expressed in natural symbols through an unusual approach to the subjects. Yet nature is not the only protagonist of the eerie. The supernatural feeling emerges only through the fragments of civilisation in the images: overgrown branches reach like outstretched hands over a construction fence, a hedge makes its way into the street like a monstrous creature, a drying rack bears witness to the presence of absence. Concrete planters, grass pavers, an abandoned gas dispenser. The human or animate is somehow present in the pictorial space and yet is not, instead dissipating like a breath on a microscope slide. It remains unknown, present in the image only as an intimation of life.

Other photographs capture lively movement directly. They are stills from wildlife-camera films showing nocturnal foxes and raccoons. Their almost monstrous presence, with sharp, flashing teeth and bright, sparkling eyes, seems predatory and threatening in the night-time setting, contradicting the peaceful country life.

In another photograph, a person with fiery red hair turns their back on us. Are they slipping through the forest? Seen against the dark outlines of the trees, the back of this head seems mysterious, unfathomable. A little like 'Alice in Wonderland'…

Ania Sudbin's worlds seem always to refer to actual experiences, to concrete places, yet ultimately never appear to reveal their secret.

Ania Sudbin, born in St Petersburg in 1987 and based in Berlin since 1990, completed her diploma in piano at the Berlin University of the Arts. At the time of the original exhibition, she was studying photography at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie (OKS) in Berlin, finding her subjects in Berlin and Brandenburg.