Echo

Stephanie Kloss

Stephanie Kloss’s photographs document not singular events, but virtual states. She often presents locations with mythological associations. They touch the viewer by suggesting what is superficially invisible: conflict, abuse, environmental disaster. At first glance, many recall a design idea from German Romanticism, including the tension between a superficial harmony and a subtle terror lurking behind it. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ that is inscribed in these nature studies is crucial; only the title makes the location recognisable. A high tension is generated between the viewer’s perception and what has really happened. We see a cove at night, for example: it is Otto Mühl’s commune on La Gomera, where children were sexually abused. Or the site where Sodom is said to have stood: the undeveloped film was x-rayed by Israeli security authorities. The branches of the Mississippi Delta after Hurricane Katrina and before the largest oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the series Delta Horizon, and the melting of the Rhone Glacier, which is covered with blankets, in Rue Belvedere. Stephanie Kloss lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2012 shows Beyond Eden at the Goethe Institute, Jerusalem, and Kibbuz und Bauhaus at the Bauhaus in Dessau.