Griechenland-Zyklus / Greece Series, 2013
Archival pigment prints, silkscreen prints on glass
ΕΜΣΤ Collection
Acquired 2022
The photographic series Griechenland Zyklus / Greece Series is the outcome of a journey Sven Johne undertook in 2012 across Greece, at a time when the country buckled under a dire fiscal crisis. More specifically, the artist travelled across locations in mainland Greece and the islands (Athens, Crete, Igoumenitsa, Ioannina, Ithaca, Kalavryta, Kefalonia, Naxos, Rhodes, Skouries, Xanthi, etc.), photographing the night sky and adding onto these images small fragments describing the earthly world in the form of brief, documentary-style, emotionally detached diary entries. These almost “clinical” recordings of what was happening “down south”, within the communities and places he visited, touristic and otherwise, reveal the contradictions between tourism and poverty in times of crisis, between the beauty of the Mediterranean landscape and the reality of debt and deprivation, between the country’s idealised past and its then current hardship. The following year, Johne presented these works in an exhibition held at the gallery space of the Camera Austria magazine in Graz, under the title Where the sky is darkest, the stars are brightest. In these photographs, the starry sky is a vast poetic presence to which one turns for consolation and redemption, a steadfast refuge in contrast to the finite temporality of social and economic uncertainty. At the same time, the very genre of documentary photography is called into question as a medium capable of narrating reality without the necessary contextualisation provided by the written word.
Combined with the silent image of the starry sky, the seemingly disconnected, ‘objective’ narrative fragments of the series reveal a constellation of subjectivities that, suddenly and cumulatively, convey a broader and more immediate image and sensation of the world. The landscape—as the artist seems to suggest—appears to be a state of mind, an ideological construct. On a meta-level, Johne comments on the very reception of images themselves. When images fall silent like the night sky, does the glimmer of the stars inspire a new existential awareness? On another level, these photographs may also recall the Northern Europeans of past centuries and their fascination with the South, which drew them toward the celebrated Grand Tour. Within our late postmodern condition, however, Sven Johne’s approach serves different purposes, aiming to incite a dialogue on contemporary social conditions, capital flows, crisis tourism-or what has been called “poornography”-and poetic dynamics.
Sven Johne was born in Bergen (Rügen Island, former East Germany) in 1976. He lives and works in Berlin.
