Sven Johne

Sven Johne (Bergen-Island Rügen, 1976, lives and works in Leipzig, Germany) operates with a mode suspended between anthropological research and narration of places. The interpretative strategy of the German artist has in particular concentrated on investigating forgotten stories of Eastern Germany, through an approach that inextricably combines realism and fiction, chronicle and imaginary. The works on show bear witness to this narrative ability, focusing in particular on a classic theme in Western literature, that of the sea and the ocean, interpreted as symbolic canons of loss, fear and wonder.

In Vinta (2004), the artist recounts, through texts and photographs, the mysteries of the island of Vinta in the German Baltic Sea, which became the location between 1922 and 1992 of a multiplicity of experiments, research and artistic operations by several people all turned out to be unsuccessful and marked by a common destiny of tragic and fatal failure.

Ship Cancellation (2004) is the result of careful research that tells the forgotten stories of transport ships sunk in the oceans of all continents from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Johne accompanies the texts with the photographic reproduction of the precise oceanic stretch in which each ship has sunk, giving indication of the measures of latitude and longitude where the disappearances of the ships took place.

Wachwechsel (2004) reports the photographic images of cargo ships and modern transport vessels hit by the crime of organized piracy, which acts at night, annihilating the crews’ control to seize control of the boats.

Seefarers Discoveries of Our Time (2008), a new production created by the artist for the Morra Greco Foundation, is the mapping of different nautical maps drawn by young professional sailors for orientation at sea. The artist has brought them together in a composition where the earth never appears, but only an uninterrupted succession of different maritime spaces. The work thus becomes the cartography of an unknown territory, suspended between reality and unreality, where the typological indications of seas and oceans create a floating suggestion between wonder and fear, sublime and catastrophic.

All images Courtesy Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli
© Danilo Donzelli