In Travel Urge, from 1998, Susanne Themlitz constructs a group of unique and unusual atmospheres by way of photography, where the register of a real voyage is mixed up with the imagined. The idea of voyage is present in the artist’s work in many ways. It may begin even at the level of the spectator’s perception, in the manner through which her works cause a rupture with the known or the foreseen, exposing our regard to the strange and the disturbing.

 

This image of an improbable place and geography brings together a landscape, which is, in that aspect, eminently evocative. The photographic veers away from what is likely or recognizable, in order to contemplate a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. One reckons that the apparently sterile, desert-like or perhaps extra-terrestrial landscape, may in fact be found to be occupied by tiny wandering characters that look as though they were kept in this suspended time and place. The images trigger multiple meanings, transforming themselves into a territory of drift, of escape, of voyage.

 

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November 2011