Silviu Guiman
STUDIO VISIT
Physical encounters with landscape
Silviu Guiman is completing an M.A. in artistic photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and is currently attending the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
His artistic education includes residencies at the PARSONS New School in New York City (2017), École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles (2022) and a guest study program in the photography class of Heidi Specker (2023) at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig.
"I am Silviu. I work artistically with photography and currently live between Cologne and Vienna.
Photography is something I try to get rid of in my work, the practice of working photographically, and I want to maintain. That means that in my ways of understanding, which I had about photography - one walks through the world, goes to places where something is happening and documents, so one comprehends, arranges, understands, takes a few photos and then makes a good selection - that's not the way of working that I find good or suitable for myself personally. That's why I abandon this idea of the photographic and try not to bring mental concepts into photography, but, because in my work, for example, it's very much about landscapes, I try to physically encounter the landscape and try to create situations where I interact with the landscape in a certain way. That means, for example, that I build sculptures, work with things I find on-site, and these things, which then result from the interaction, I then photograph. But also the photographing of it happens partly extremely intuitively. And therefore photography is something extremely new for me right now. And not what it used to be.
We are currently in the studio with Rheiner and I'm showing excerpts of my current work here within the next week. The exhibition title is AUR, which means gold in Romanian. I spent the last 3 to 4 years in a gold mining area in Romania, in Roșia Montană. Most of the gold on the European continent is located there and accordingly, there have been many conflicts there over the past millennia. I have not managed to depict the history yet the complexity of this place, photographically and my way of working has changed in such a way that I approach this place with an expanded understanding of photography. And that means that I have been looking for ways how this landscape itself can become an actor.
I believe that with photography, you can actually shape or change states of consciousness. And I'm in the process of figuring out how to do that. That's why it's about the atmospheric for me. It's about states, about moods. It's about the dreamlike. It's about what happens when you no longer use the logic of thinking and analyzing, but when you use the logic of dreams. And that also plays a role in my current project AUR, because at some point, I simply asked myself: What if this place could dream?
We're dealing with images here, where I try to work more symbolically. Symbols that have emerged from the connection, that I tried to establish with this place, over the period of time I have spent there."
"I sometimes don't even look through the camera anymore when I'm taking photos, but rather let things happen. These intuitive movements, which one might know from painting, that's actually what I've tried to bring into photography, so that things happen that I can't think of. And that's what photography is for me: namely this change, that it's no longer a method or a gesture for me to comprehend the world, definitely not to describe the world, but photography has now become something with which I can build worlds."
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Studio Visits
With its museums, galleries and art spaces, Cologne offers a broad field of photography. Naturally, there is also a correspondingly large and diverse artist scene here that works and experiments with the medium. In our new section Studio Visits, we would like to introduce you to artistic positions and take you to the production and thinking spaces of art. Have fun!
